Kill the God

"It is done." Elspeth kills the God of Revels.

"The humans think us immortal. Should we test that?"

— Loki to Thor (before dropping him out of a helicarrier), The Avengers (2012)

Deicide, meaning killing a god.

To kill the gods/God/Crystal Dragon Jesus is a daunting task. You're often dealing with an Immortal, Nigh-Invulnerable, Physical God that can probably snuff the life out of you in an instant.

However, in fiction, you may have a setting where you can Kill the Gods. This makes sense if the character who kills the god is its equal or greater in power, although it's not unheard of to see someone who's weaker than the god kill them anyway.

If the Gods Need Prayer Badly, this could be accomplished by everybody ceasing worship at once (or, in a setting with multiple gods and/or religions, slaughtering the god's followers) and letting the god just shrivel up. The more direct method may need acquiring an Immortal Breaker weapon.

Make sure, by the way, that you are killing the entire god, and not just a projection of the God in Human Form. Otherwise this is Fighting a Shadow.

Of course, once you do this, the God Is Dead, with possible consequences aplenty. See also Rage Against the Heavens. Compare Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?, which their cause of death qualifies for if the god-killer is a mortal or otherwise much less powerful than the god that was killed. A warning for those warrior nay-sayers; in a setting where there are multiple gods, slaying one of them is a powerful indicator of the threat posed to them, and may result in some pre-emptive retribution for their own safety (and possibly to punish the arrogance of mortals who act outside their perceived place).

See The Death of Death if someone takes down The Grim Reaper. When it involves eating the god during/afterwards the kill or inflicting a Fate Worse than Death, see God-Eating.

Do not confuse with Creator Killer.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Happens to practically all of the Magic Gods in A Certain Magical Index after Aleister Crowley out-gambits them and forces them all to a human level.
• Almost happens to Haruhi at the hands of Kuyo and Fujiwara at the climax of The Astonishment of Haruhi Suzumiya Vol. 2.
• Bleach:
  • The pre-timeskip’s climax focuses on Aizen's obsession with reaching and surpassing the realm of divinity. However, his target (the Soul King) is officially regarded as a king by most characters. The arc ends with Aizen's defeat and the death of Gin, who used his own God-Killing Spear to try and slay Aizen. And unfortunately for Gin, death didn't quite take for Aizen.
  • Yhwach, the Quincy King and Emperor of the Vandenreich, seeks to kill the Soul King, who serves as the linchpin holding the realms together, in order to merge all the realms together and eliminate the very concept of Death. After Mimihagi opposes him in this, Yhwach decides to assimilate both the Soul King's corpse and Mimihagi in order to absorb their power, turning him into a transcendent being with the power to merge the realms himself. Ultimately Ichigo is able to kill him after Uryu shoots Yhwach with a Still Silver arrow that temporarily de-powers him and prevents him from using The Almighty to resurrect himself. For added irony, his corpse is used to replace the Soul King as the new linchpin.
• The main premise of Campione! is that when somebody kills a god, they get Cursed with Awesome to receive that god's Combo Platter Powers. Thus, deicide pretty much happens once an arc.
• A variation occurs in Code Geass. Emperor Charles and his brother, V.V., having lost their parents to the machinations of their Decadent Court, promised each other as children that if there was a god that made people fight and scheme against each other for power, they would kill him. By the time they are older and in a position to put their plan into action, their understanding of the situation has sufficiently evolved that they're no longer trying to kill the "god" they have discovered, but they are planning to use it to enact an Assimilation Plot where all human consciousness, past and present, will unite so the fighting will stop and the dead will return.
• Dead Rock: The main protagonist Yakuto’s goal is to kill God for revenge for destroying his village and killing his parents.
• Satou Pendragon from Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody wakes up in another world and is beset by a group of Lizard Folk that try to attack him; Satou creates a Meteor Storm which not only wipes out his attackers, but also manages to accidentally kill the unseen Dragon God that was living in the area: earning Satou the Title of God-Killer.
• This can happen in Death Note when a Shinigami kills someone with their notebooks to selflessly save another person's life. This happens to Gelus and Rem when they save Misa's life.
• Majin Buu kills plenty of Kais, which are basically the Gods of the Dragon Ball universe. In fact, he became Fat Buu after absorbing the Grand Supreme Kai, who was the ruler of not only the Kais, but the Dragon Ball universe as a whole.
  • In Dragon Ball Super Zamasu and Goku Black killed all the gods of the multiverse in Future Trunks's timeline (with the exception of Universe 7's Supreme Kai, which the manga shows was killed by Dabura) so no one would stop their Zero Mortals Plan.
  • In Super Dragon Ball Heroes, Hearts the God Hater wants to kill every god in existence, believing they are tyrants. He succeeds in killing Fused Zamasu, but is stopped before he can get any others.
• Edens Bowy centers on the God Hunters, whose explicit ability - and instinct, apparently - is to, well, kill gods. Spike's Start of Darkness happens when he unintentionally kills his lover, a descended goddess, because of his instinct overpowering him. He later kills the Big Bad, a fish-like god named Lumezavia.
• Mimori questing to find a way to do this is the main premise behind Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything With Low-Level Spells as goddess Vysis is completely morally bankrupt and sentenced him to die for the crime of existing in her world, after she summoned him in the first place, without regard for his, or the rest of his class's consent.
• This is what God Slayer Magic is all about in Fairy Tail, though ironically the one time we actually do get to see a god slain, it's by resident Dragon Slayer Natsu punching the mountain-sized behemoth in the face with an explosion of fire that blows it up. Though God Slayer Sherria manages to defeat an even stronger god channeled through one of the strongest wizards in the world, specifically the god Chronos through the God-Soul Takeover mage DiMaria Yesta, even if she sacrificed her magic in order to empower herself to that point.
• New Getter Robo the final fight has the Getter team fighting four beings who describe themselves as gods and accomplish feats no less then bringing themselves back from death come to destroy the Getter Robo before it evolves into the terrifying Getter Emperor.
• In Pokémon: Arceus and the Jewel of Life, the Big Bad attempts to kill Arceus, the creator god of the Pokémon universe, by drowning it in mercury/molten silver once it's weakened after Ash and his friends go back in time to Set Right What Once Went Wrong. He almost succeeds, but Ash manages to return it to full strength using the Jewel of Life.
• In Princess Mononoke, Lady Eboshi kills the forest spirit, which is a sort of Physical God. The results, however, aren't quite what she intended.
• The whole premise of Record of Ragnarok is this trope in Tournament Arc form: thirteen gods from different religions fight thirteen legendary humans from throughout history in a series of one-on-one death matches before an audience of all gods and all humanity. If the gods take home the most victories, humanity will be wiped out; if the human champions do, humanity lives on. And to make it a slightly more even playing field, the humans are given special divine weapons known as Volund (actually valkyries who have taken humanity's side and transformed themselves into weapons) that are capable of wounding gods in a way mortals normally wouldn't be able to. Despite the vast power gap in every round, quite a few gods do meet their end, including Poseidon, Hercules, Bishamonten/Zerofuku, and Hades.
• An extremely difficult proposition in Saint Seiya, as the gods (with the exception of Eris in the first OVA) are really powerful, but possible with the right means. The real problem is getting them to STAY dead: Poseidon apparently died millennia before the series, but still managed to operate as a spirit and by Grand Theft Me.
• In Symphogear AXZ, protagonist Hibiki Tachibana's Gungnir is revealed to have a connection to the Spear of Longinus, meaning that it has the unique ability to allow her punches to kill any divine being that the team is forced to fight against.

Comic Books

• Aquila: Several gods are killed throughout the comic, including the guardian deity of Rome, who happens to be a giant wolf bitch living in the sewers beneath the capital of the world.
• The Authority manage to kill the Maker of Earth, a planet-sized alien being, at the stroke of midnight on January 1st 2000.
• Black Moon Chronicles: Deicide is apparently possible in the setting. When Lucifer's demons rampage around the world after Haazheel opens the Hell Gate between their dimensions, they attack the Oracle's sanctuary intending to destroy the Oracle before Wismerhill intervenes and slays the demons. On the other hand, Methraton later specifically seals Lucifer away after his defeat because he doesn't know of any way to kill a god.
• Darkseid sees other gods besides his New God underlings as threats to his conquest of everything, so he kills them and takes their powers.
  "There was a war in Heaven. I won."
• In The DCU it happens often enough to Godlike space beings that the Guardians of the Universe call it a 1011.
• The title character of Harry Kipling (Deceased) does this on a regular basis. He can do it because he's technically a god himself.
• The Last God is about what happens when the group of heroes who apparently saved the world by killing the last of the gods turn out to have lied, resulting in a new generation of heroes having to finish the job 30 years later.
• In Marvel Zombies Galactus himself gets eaten by the Zombies.
• The Mighty Thor:
  • Desak wants to kill every god in the universe because of the actions of his home planet's Jerkass Gods.
  • Gorr the God Butcher from Thor: God of Thunder acts much like Desak, except he indulges in Cold-Blooded Torture because his home planet's Jerkass Gods didn't do anything to alleviate the Trauma Conga Line of himself and his people. Then he got hold of the weapon of an Elder God, which is essentially like a weapon of dark energy. Only worse. Nightmare Fuel ensues. Ironically, the Necrosword itself may very well have been the reason Gorr's gods never answered his world's prayers — they were all slain by it. Thor claims that the Necrosword was forged for the purpose of killing gods, something later confirmed - it was forged out of the primordial darkness by Knull, an Elder God who also spawned the Klyntar, the species that produced the Venom symbiote. The ancestral memory of the heat of the forge and the sound of forging are apparently why they're vulnerable to heat and sound.
• In New Avengers, this happens to the Living Tribunal, after the Beyonders kill it, sending its corpse across the multiverse. In The Ultimates, this happens again to the new Tribunal (a version of Adam Warlock) at the hands of Master Order and Lord Chaos, but he's resurrected after the cosmic Reset Button is pushed.
• It happens in Preacher. The Saint of Killers REALLY lived up to his name.
• The Superior Spider Man does this to the Master Weaver in Spider-Verse, then proceeds to try to destroy the Web of Life and Destiny in an attempt to Screw Destiny.
• In Thorgal, Ogotai gets shot in the back with his own plasma gun. He wasn't a real god, just a dangerously delusional and terribly powerful alien psychic, but from the characters' power level, he certainly counts. And he did have a Mayincatec civilization doing mass human sacrifices for him.
• Wonder Woman has killed Ares in multiple continuities, though as she explained to Steve Trevor the first time they did so generally a human killing an Olympian only weakens them as their physical forms are only a part of their power. In Wonder Woman (2011) it actually sticks and his title and power as God of War passes on to Diana.

Fan Works

• In Absolute Power Sucks Absolutely, Maxime comes within a hairs-breadth Zeus when the latter makes it clear that he wants to "teach [him his] place" by torturing one of Maxime's elves for working in Greece. Diana saves Maxime the trouble and stabs Zeus to death when it's clear that the situation would end in a bloodbath otherwise.
• Child of the Storm has Doctor Strange murder Camazotz, a god of blood and night, in a ritual to commit genocide on his spawn, the Red Court of Vampires. Since they're Always Chaotic Evil, no one is particularly bothered, more shocked that he could pull it off.
• Codex Equus deconstructs this. According to BrutalityInc, killing a god, while extremely difficult, would have catastrophic consequences based on what domains they have. This is because gods are products of both the elements of the natural world and abstract concepts created by sapientkind. For example, killing a Water god would cause massive floods, while killing a War god would birth rampant conflicts, and killing a Wind god would cause uncontrollable storms. This is largely the reason why gods tend to resort to either sealing away or devouring other gods because actually killing one is a cost too great to handle. However, it is possible to contain the catastrophic meltdown that follows if one has the power or means to do so.
  • A Codexverse drabble provides an In-Universe example inspired by the mechanics of the Pony POV Series. In a session of Ogres & Oubliettes hosted by Spike, the Big Bad is a god who loved mortal sapientkind so much that he tried killing off every other god in the universe (save for himself) so he could give them the power to literally change the world as they wished to. It's deconstructed as with every god killed, the universe is robbed of vital Concepts that keep it stable and thriving. Once the god is defeated and erased from existence (with divine help), many people had to replace the murdered gods by adopting their mantles to keep the universe from falling apart; one of said people is Moon Ray Vaughoof's character avatar, a Necromancer who takes on the mantle of a Death god.
• In Crucible, this (or an attempt thereof) is stated to be the only crime on the Equestrian books which carries the death penalty. Unfortunately for Twilight Sparkle, she accidentally caused Princess Celestia to fry herself nearly to death.
• Dungeon Keeper Ami is leaning towards this. Ami has discussed some plans (some even viable, apparently) for killing Metallia. It appears she may have to resort to this sooner, however, as both Crowned Death and Azzaratha, the Mighty Tyrant, are baying for her blood due to her many offenses against them and her general attitude to being a keeper in general.
  • The Unraveler of Mysteries has moved in opposition to her at least once, but it seems that she is less inclined to seek vengeance against Ami, and intends to study or recruit her instead.
• It's believed in-universe that the world of Fledglings was formed following the death of most legendaries save for Arceus at the hands of selfish Pokémon using the power of the "Star of Destruction".
• In The Immortal Game, Alicorns are considered as the equivalent of deities. And King Titan ends up kicking the bucket.
• The main story arc of Left Beyond concerns a plan of this nature. It's averted, though, since the Omega organization's plan to kill both God and Satan in order to preserve humanity's free will ultimately fails. True to their modus operandi, the Omega simply move on to the next backup plan.
• Pony POV Series:
  • This technically is possible, but not easy nor recommended. The deities don't just rule over concepts of existence, they are concepts of existence. Killing one of them results in their concept being Ret-Gone from time, along with anyone who was alive because of that Concept. The only true example of this happening was the pony who killed Cupid, and it was second only in destruction to the universe to Nightmare Eclipse's plans.
  • During the finale arc, the villains invoke this by making digital clones of several video game heroes with a habit of doing this (Bayonetta, Asura, Kratos, and Demi-Fiend) to guard their castle. Subverted, when the gods they end up going up against are the Elders. Because they were just digital clones, not the real deal, the so-called 'god-killers' didn't stand a chance.
• The Prayer Warriors do this to every god they meet, in rather quick ways.
• In The Weaver Option the Emperor uses Taylor's forces to kill the Chaos God Slaanesh by first destroying its main source of power and then luring it into a place where it will be vulnerable to attack with an anti-daemon weapon.
• Discussed in When Reason Fails. Demi-Powers are god-like yet theoretically slayable by humanity, it just takes a lot of resources to do and generally considered not worth it unless they are rampaging Disasters. Shoto explains that due to Aiko being a relatively young god, it is easier to slay her without an equal loss of potential gains from achieving the feat, which is why Izuku's Cabal have to keep her nature a secret from anyone they don't trust or can't keep a secret from anyway or UA would become a battle ground for various organisations going after the Outsider of Existence.

Films — Animated

• In Hercules, Hades attempts to kill Hercules by forcing him to drink poison that will turn him mortal. Herc ends up drinking all but the last drop, so he keeps one aspect of his godhood.

Films — Live-Action

• Star Trek V's climax involves going to the heart of the galaxy and meeting an omnipotent, godlike being in need of a starship, and then shooting it in the face.
• In Clash of the Titans (2010), various rulers are trying to do this to the Olympians by destroying their temples and denying them worship. While it does weaken them, the gods are still powerful enough to inflict misery on the commonfolk, whose suffering their arrogant rulers ignore. It also doesn't do anything to weaken Hades, since he draws power from their fear of death.
• The climax of Dogma involves the protagonist finding and killing God^note God has currently taken human form, and the body is in a coma on life support, so incapacitated from doing anything, in order to allow Her to return to Heaven and appear at the place She needs to be to stop the villain from destroying the universe.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Thor: The Dark World, Thor's mother Frigga gets killed by Kurse. Subverted somewhat in that the Asgardians don't see themselves as gods, but were worshipped by humans as such.
  • Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War casually Neck Lifts and chokes Loki, the God of Mischief, to death right after curb-stomping Thor and Hulk.
  • Eternals: Initially, the Eternals planned to put Tiamut to sleep and figure out how to save humanity in the meantime. After Druig is blasted by Ikaris, Sersi has to change plans and opts for turning Tiamut to stone.
  • The entire motivation of Gorr the God Butcher, the villain of Thor: Love and Thunder. After his god Rapu, whom he and his now-deceased people devoutly worshipped, turns out to be a Jerkass God who doesn't give a shit about the deaths of any of his subjects (including Gorr's daughter), Gorr renounces him, and uses the Necrosword to slay him. The sword corrupts Gorr enough that he decides to take out his hatred by killing all the gods in the universe, regardless of whether they're Jerkass Gods or not, including Thor and the rest of the Asgardians.
• In Wonder Woman (2017), the ultimate purpose of the aptly named "God Killer" is to slay Ares, who himself had killed the rest of the Greek Pantheon. Diana was told it was a sword, which she stole to fulfill its supposed purpose, only for Ares to destroy it easily. He then reveals that only a god can kill another god, and that the actual "God Killer" is Diana herself, as a child purposefully conceived by Zeus to kill Ares.

Literature

• The Beginning After the End:
  • At the end of Volume 9, Arthur Leywin, who ever since the previous volume has recognized that the Asuras are his true enemies for their role in the conflict that ravaged his homeland and harmed his loved ones, has now killed one. The Asura in question being Taci, a former sparring partner of his during his time in Epheotus who had been tasked by Kezess to exterminate Arthur's remaining friends and family in the Dicathian Resistance after he deemed that they had outlived their usefulness to him and who despite being very young by Asuran standards nonetheless managed to overpower and slaughter a good portion of the Resistance prior to Arthur's arrival. Of course, as the story continues Taci's death is only just the beginning as the war against the Asuras will inevitably see Arthur add more deities to his kill count.
  Arthur: You want to know what I've become? Godkiller should be appropriate.
  • In Volume 10, Seris Vritra ends up capturing the Sovereign Orlaeth Vritra and keeps him incapacitated for use in her rebellion against the Vritra. At the end of the volume, she broadcasts herself executing him in front of all of Alacrya to show the mortal populace that the Sovereigns can bleed and to encourage them to rise up against their Vritra overlords.
• The Blue World by Jack Vance where descendants of a crashed prison ship live on an ocean world and worship a giant "kragens". This originally started as them feeding one of them so it would become bigger and drive off the others, and now a corrupt priesthood is keeping this going. Even though it's not a real god the protagonist still has problems, like where is he going to get enough metal to forge weapons on an ocean world?
• Several gods are slain using the eponymous items in the Book of Swords series by Fred Saberhagen. In fact, once humans realize gods are not immortal, they start not believing in them, and the rest die from disbelief.
• The Cosmere:
  • At the climax of the first Mistborn novel, Vin kills the Lord Ruler, an immortal tyrant most of humanity regards as God though he's really just a very powerful, very intelligent human. Then at the end of the last book she offs a real god, Ruin. In this case, Vin had just ascended to godhood herself as Ruin's equal and opposite, and she was able to destroy him by sacrificing herself to do it.
  • The setting as a whole features Adonalsium, who is splintered into 16 shards, Hoid and the 16 Shardholders killed Adonalsium, with the Shardholders each holding a specific aspect of Adonalsium, raising those 16 to godhood. At least 4 have been since murdered.
  • In Rhythm of War Taravangian kills Rayse, Vessel of Odium, and ascends to godhood, becoming the new Odium.
• In Craft Sequence, the human Craftsmen started a war with the gods. They managed to kill most of them.
• Sebastian Steer inThe Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids boasts, in a throwaway line, of having killed the Old God Nyarlathotep. Of course, The Multiverse is in effect, allowing a different version of Nyarlathotep to show up in a later, perfectly fine, to attend Thymon's birthday party, but it's still viewed as a rather impressive feat.
• This happens in The Crocodile God, when a Spaniard kills the Tagalog sea-god Haik's daughter. Since the "deicide" in question was basically shooting a pregnant woman in front of her husband, this pushes Haik over the Despair Event Horizon—it's not only a personal loss of a child, but heralds the Death of the Old Gods in the Philippines. Later on it's revealed that even before then, Haik thought the REST of the Tagalog gods were dead as well, including his many cousins and his sister, which no doubt made his trauma worse.
• In Dark Heart, the gods of Caliel were once mortals who rose to power after rebelling against and overthrowing the selfish, power-hungry elder gods.
• Discworld:
  • In Hogfather, the plot is driven by an attempt to assassinate the Santa Claus Expy, the Hogfather, by using magic to keep children from believing in him. At one point the protagonist stops to consider that the Hogfather really is a god when you get down to it (leave snacks as a sacrifice, he bestows gifts as blessings), and indeed, the story explains that he's basically the modern incarnation of an old solstice deity.
  • In The Last Hero, Cohen the Barbarian and the Silver Horde, remembering how the first Hero of legend, Fingers-Mazda, stole fire from the gods, decide, as their final act, to head to Cori Celesti, the home of the gods, and return the stolen fire. With interest.
• In the Dragonlance novels, a Bad Future shows how Raistlin managed to not only kill all the other Gods of Krynn but rise to godhood himself, but at a horrible cost to the rest of the world where he ended up killing everything, leaving him trapped alone for eternity in a world that will never know the touch of life again. A large part of the Legends trilogy is making sure this never comes to pass in the main timeline.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Immortal gods and Fae are a pain to kill. Even chopping off their head or grinding them into nothing won't keep them dead forever. Only two conditions are known where gods can surely be killed. First, when a plane of existence is created to permit it. Second on Halloween until the first birdsong is heard the next morning.
  • In Summer Knight Harry killed the Summer Lady Aurora.
  • In Cold Days, Harry is given an assignment to kill an Immortal, namely Maeve, the Winter Lady. He is less than pleased with this daunting task. But Murphy is the one who ends up killing Maeve. And before that, Maeve kills Lily, the Summer Lady, with a bullet to her head. According to Bob, even THIS does not technically stick. Maeve may be dead, but this just means someone ELSE becomes the Winter Lady, and eventually becoming, if not Maeve, something very close.
• David Eddings:
  • In The Belgariad, Belgarion of Riva has "Godslayer" as one of his official titles, and it isn't honorary.
  • Sparhawk kills a god at the end of both The Elenium and The Tamuli. The gods were even aware this was a danger, because Sparhawk was born Immune to Fate.
  • The Big Bad of The Tamuli goes for a variant on the Gods Need Prayer Badly method — he orders his minions to kill off Aphrael's worshipers, because without them Aphrael will herself die.
• In Everworld gods can't be killed by mortal means, but they can be killed by other gods or godly weapons. Or modern weapons from our world. There's also the Eldritch Abomination Ka Anor, an alien god who eats other gods and is basically trying to genocide the whole holy race.
• In Factory of the Gods, Julian has to kill multiple gods throughout the series. Fortunately, its possible to kill them by just hitting them hard enough, or in the right way that bypasses their resistances.
• Forest Kingdom: In the Hawk & Fisher spinoff series' book 3 (The God Killer), this is the goal of the title character... or at least, to kill beings that are worshipped as gods, yet don't have the power to save the titular killer from dying of cancer, and whom the killer thus considers to be only pretenders and thus deserving of death.
• Found very appropriately in The God Eaters. Keiran and Ashleigh are forced to kill 3 (though 1 only loses a body) god(s) to ensure their freedom and safety. It might help that these are actually deities of human origin. The worst one will probably come back.
• Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest: The only way a God can actually die is when a mortal kills it with a Magical Weapon not on orders from another god, but by their own free will. Nigel manages to kill the Lost God (in Franklin's body) with his grandfather's magic ax.
• In His Dark Materials, this is Asriel's mission. There's also a knife which is properly called the god-destroyer. Subverted in the end: when "The Authority" does actually die, it's more out of extreme old age than any deliberate effort on anyone's part.
• In the second book of the Inheritance Trilogy, an order of people fanatically loyal to the god Itempas attempt to kill his brother/lover/rival (it's complicated) Nahadoth.
• Journey to Chaos: Kallen Selios' airship, Albatros IX, has a "smite gods" button. It channels divine power that she received from various events such as the Siduban Chaos Explosion. It only took two direct hits for this thing to kill a low-rung Grim Reaper. Emily points out the Bullying a Dragon aspect of this but Kallen does no care.
• The goal of Nicolae Carpathia's Global Community One World Unity Army at the battle of Armageddon in the Left Behind book Glorious Appearing, and also that of The Other Light at the end of the Millennium Kingdom in Kingdom Come — neither of which was achieved as God and Jesus wiped out both armies.
• The Emperor, a.k.a. John, of The Locked Tomb is revered by his Nine Houses as "the man who became God and the God who became man", and Harrow's narration often directly refers to him as "God". Multiple characters have made attempts in his life, starting with the Resurrection Beasts, made up of the souls of the planets he killed (those of our solar system).
  • Harrow the Ninth even broadcasts throughout that he's going to be killed, since several chapters start with "[X amount of time] before the Emperor's murder", but leaves it a mystery as to who will kill him: the Resurrection Beasts, or someone else. Mercymorn, one of God's saints/Lyctors, is the one to do it as part of a plan with Augustine, another Lyctor; however, John ultimately revives from the attempt after a few minutes and kills her instead (and in her case, it actually sticks).
  • Nona the Ninth, which goes into John's backstory, we learn that he himself basically did this to Gaia, the spirit of the Earth itself who was a god in her own right. As thanks for John always trying to save the Earth, she gave him his necromancy powers, only for him to destroy her and all the other planets, and resurrect her as Alecto, his cavalier. At the end of the book, when Alecto is awakened from the Locked Tomb, one of the first things she does is travel through the River and stab John.
• Malazan Book of the Fallen:
  • War God Fener is on the receiving end of this from Karsa Orlong towards the end of The Crippled God. Karsa Orlong shatters a statue of him in his last remaining temple, giving Fener, who has been on a downward spiral ever since Heboric inadvertently yanked him out of the heavens, the last push.
  • Traveller's main goal in life is to kill the God of Death in revenge for what happened to his daughter. It almost works, but Anomander Rake gets to it first, then taunts Traveller into a duel if he still wants to get Hood.
• In the Nightside series, Belle acquired her Super-Speed by killing and skinning a minor Greek godling, then making boots out of his skin. Bad Penny killed Herne the Hunter for telling John Taylor information that Walker wants kept quiet. And in the short story "Razor Eddie's Big Night Out", it's revealed that the Punk God of the Straight Razor attained his divinity by killing the war-god Mithras in defense of a priest who'd been kind to him.
• In Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Pan is killed because of a lack of people who believe in him, which also doubled as a Green Aesop.
• A Practical Guide to Evil:
  • Sabah killed an Ork God when claiming her new Name as Captain.
  Captain: You’re going to need another god. I broke this one.
  • Wekesa seems to have killed some (lesser) gods, too - he stores them in the basement of his Mage Tower for experimentation.
  • When going to the Everdark, Catherine offers the invading dwarves to kill the Drows' goddesses, the Sve Noc in exchange for free passage, gold, and an army. It doesn't work, and she (as the Queen of Winter of godlike power herself) only escapes the fate of being made a sacrifice by allying with the Sve Noc and willingly trading her power away.
• Raise Some Hell : Or more aptly, kill the Devil.
• The gods of Ravelling Wrath are too alien to be killed in any normal sense, but they can be slowly weakened if their human Ravellers are killed. And if this goes on long enough… Well, the Blood God refers to it as "being erased", and the secret goal of the Waiting God is to make this happen.
  Rinn: The word killed felt wrong – killing was something that happened to humans, not gods. But I wasn’t sure what else to say. There wasn’t a word for eliminating a god, because that wasn’t something that ever happened.
• The Raven Tower:
  • Gods Need Prayer Badly, performing miracles expends that power, and losing all of it is the simplest way a god can die.
  • One god can speak another's death, but this is immensely draining, even if the target is already weakened. The Strength and Patience of the Hill gets knocked out for two years when it does so, and another god is surprised that it survived the attempt at all.
  • Mortals can't do much to harm a god directly, but might be able to exploit loopholes in the god's own words to deadly effect. The ploy to kill the Raven relies on forcing it to drain itself upholding its promises to the city while denying it Human Sacrifice that it relies on.
  • The Strength and Patience of the Hill relates a story about a god who blessed a spear carried by a certain hunter so that, once a day, it would kill anything it was thrown at. When one of the hunter's descendants turned out to be capable of activating the spear's properties (because they had the same name, an loophole in the Exact Words of the blessing), the god asked for it back, since it wasn't supposed to do that. The guy tossed the spear to the god, and it hadn't been used that day.
• The Ripple System: Newly-summoned gods are relatively vulnerable, and Ned tries to figure out if they can kill Tyrann's god before it becomes permanent. Turns out they can. By using the Portal Network, they jump behind the defensive lines, kill the god, and render the entire cult severely weakened.
• Saintess Summons Skeletons: Sofia is given a quest to defeat the god of Scripture — of whom she is technically the unwilling Saintess. Since Scripture's previous interactions with her have involved kidnapping and enslaving her, infecting all his church leadership with soul parasites that turn them into undead, and massacring the orphanage where Sofia grew up, she's happy to oblige. The fact that the quest has a 100-year time limit is indicative, though, of the difficulty of killing even a minor god.
• In Silverwing, Nocturna has been killed by the more vicious Bat God named Zotz. This is revealed in the Firewing book.
• In The Traitor Son Cycle, Harmodius eventually gets fed up with the machinations of his world's Physical Gods and decides that he wants to have them all murder each other and kill what's left - only for other characters to point out that they can't even win against one of them on their own without the aid of another, so perhaps Harmodius might want to put his masterplan on hold.

Live-Action TV

• The Black Mirror episode USS Callister is about a sadistic game designer who cools off from work with an RPG of his creation inspired by the in-universe Star Trek knockoff. There, he acts as the Jerkass God of that world, inflicting Video Game Cruelty Potential on sapient clones of his co-workers. The episode ends with the characters of the game staging a rebellion and trapping him within the game, killing off his real-world self as if he were a JRPG Final Boss, and leaving them free to explore the game universe as they please.
• The entire fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer revolves around killing Glory, a seemingly unstoppable hellgod trapped in a mortal body.
• Done quite a few times in Doctor Who with Sufficiently-Advanced Aliens:
  • "Pyramids of Mars": The 4th Doctor kills Sutekh the Destroyer, last of the godlike Osirians who inspired the Egyptian Gods.
  • The 7th Doctor could be quite good at this. "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy" has him defeat the Gods of Ragnarok. In Death Comes to Time, generally thought of as non-canon, he kills the rogue Time Lord General Tannis and seemingly dies in the process (here the Time Lords all have Reality Warper capabilities and are referred to as Gods of the Fourth).
  • "The Parting of the Ways": Rose, temporarily powered up as the Bad Wolf entity, destroys the God-Emperor of the Daleks.
  • Although not necessarily a god, "The Satan Pit" has the Doctor do this to an entity who looks like and claims to be Satan.
  • "The Rings of Akhaten" has Clara do this to Akhaten, an Eldritch Abomination Genius Loci which feeds on stories.
    • This seems partially based on the audio drama "Phobos", where the 8th Doctor kills a Godlike being living inside a wormhole that feeds on fear by showing it his fears.
• Legends of Tomorrow: In the Season 5 finale, the Legends kill Atropos (one of the Greek Fates) by throwing her into the Loom of Fate and strangling her with her own fate thread as it's added to the Loom. This causes the whole thing to explode, taking her with it.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Adar, a Dark Elf and ancestor to the Orcs, claims to have managed the impossible and slain the Evil Sorcerer, Sauron, for how badly he treated his kin. Sauron is a Maia, a weaker member of the same race as the Valar who serve as the setting's gods. Unbeknownst to Adar, Sauron is alive in the form of a human. Word of God says that his race see bodies of flesh and blood the way we see clothes, though it's more complex for evil members, so it's possible that Adar actually did destroy Sauron's body and weaken him.
• In Stargate SG-1, a device is created that is capable of killing ascended beings. In the Ori galaxy, the Ori themselves are ascended beings who have convinced their followers that they are gods. The device is sent through a stargate to the Ori galaxy, where it goes off, destroying all of the Ori. It is SG-1's impressive tally of dead Goa'uld that starts enslaved humans and Jaffa thinking that maybe the Goa'uld aren't truly gods after all.
• Star Trek:
  • Worf claims that Klingons have no gods, because they killed them centuries ago. Apparently they were "more trouble than they were worth." We later learn that this was actually a joke. The gods were really all killed almost immediately after the first two Klingons were created; this partnership is the core of the Klingon ideal of marriage.
  • In the TOS episode, "Who Mourns for Adonais", an alien claiming to be the Greek god Apollo captures the Enterprise. They destroy the source of his powers and he "spreads himself upon the winds" to join his fellow gods that had passed on.
• Supernatural:
  • In season five, Lucifer wipes out a hotel full of gods in about five minutes.
  • Death claims he will reap God at the end of time.
  • In "Meet the New Boss", the Winchesters bind Death to try to kill Castiel, who has become an outright god. Death does dispute this by calling him a "mutated angel", but right before he's about to take him, Castiel solves the stand-off by freeing Death.
  • The Winchesters have killed a number of pagan gods, including a Vanir.
  • In the Season 10 finale Dean kills Death with his own scythe.
  • The Winchesters spend most of season 11 trying to figure out how to kill Amara, who is God's sister and His equal in power. And during one attempt near the end of the season, Amara almost kills God. Since they're actually primordial entities predating creation, either of them being killed would have some dire consequences to the universe at large.
  • In the season 14 finale, God creates a special gun, "the Equalizer", which he claims has enough power to kill an increasingly deranged Jack, the half-angel son of Lucifer. When God's own manipulations come to light and He opts to smite Jack personally when Dean refuses, Sam picks up the gun in a desperate attempt to kill God. It seemingly has no effect, but the next season shows that it did damage Him, as it ties his essence to that of Sam and traps him in one universe. He eventually manages to repair himself after pushing Sam over the Despair Event Horizon.
  • In season 15, it transpires that Death is planning to kill God after he truly goes off the deep end. She thinks that Jack could potentially become powerful enough to actually succeed, especially since God has an Achilles' Heel: in order to create the universe, he had to write himself into its make-up, which also made him mortal. The brothers still worry whether killing him with Amara still around could throw reality out of whack. If they do go through with it, they'll both have to go. Ultimately, after Death is revealed to have been playing them and is taken off the board herself, Jack manages to steal all of God's powers and leave him trapped as a God in Human Form, doomed to die of old age someday.
• In Xena: Warrior Princess, the title character gains the Power to Kill Gods in the season 5 finale, and uses it so often that she is billed as "Xena of Amphipolis, the Warrior Princess, Slayer of Gods and Defender of the Elijans."

Music

• The third act of Fireaxe's epic four hour metal album Food for the Gods centers around Satan leading an army of demons and damned in a full-on assault of Heaven with this goal. And it works! Sort of.
• Aviators's album Godhunter. At the end of the world, the immortal ruler of the last city on earth sits on his throne, awaiting the Godhunter who will put an end to his eternal reign.
  When you see the hunter coming
  Then you hide or keep on running
  Cause she's slain the gods before.

Mythology and Religion

• According to The Bible, this is the result of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in 33 A.D. From the same source, this act was subverted three days after its commission.
• Older Than Dirt: In Egyptian Mythology, Set chopped up his brother Osiris and threw all the pieces into the Nile. His sister put him back together.
• In Greek Mythology, the Ophiotaurus was said to grant the power to defeat the gods to anyone who burned its entrails. The Titans managed to kill it, but Zeus sent an eagle to snatch its entrails before they could be burned.
• In Pacific Mythology, the prophet Lanikaula defeated and killed the Pahulu, gods of sorcery that used to dwell on the island of Moloka'i.
• In Japanese Mythology, the goddess Izanami died by giving birth to a god of fire. Her husband, Izanagi, killed the child Kagutsuchi out of grief. After her death, Izanami fell into the underworld and became a zombie goddess. The Kojiki also has cases where mythical Japanese emperors fought and killed the 'gods of the earth', probably allusion to the pacification of rival tribes. However, the emperors themselves were descended from Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess of the Heaven, so these are probably cases of takes one to kill one.
• Norse Mythology:
  • Balder is killed by an arrow (or spear) through the heart shot by Hodr, but he was set up by Loki. He knew Balder's only weakness: mistletoe. In Gesta Danorum's version, Baldr dies via a sword called mistletoe.
  • At Ragnarok, Odin, Thor, Loki, Heimdall, Frey, and most of the Aesir bite it at the hands of giants, trolls, Fenrir, Jormungandr, and Surtr.
• In Odinani religion, every god except for the Superior one who is the origin of all things, only exists to serve a specific purpose. Once that purpose has been fulfilled they die. In this case "killing" them would be a good thing, as it means you are becoming more self sufficient.
• Two of the most important characters in Navaho mythology are twin miracle-performing sons of White-Shell Woman, Yolkai Estsan, chief goddess, named Nayenezgani (whose name literally means Slayer of Alien Gods) and Tobadzischini who killed numerous divine bird, animal, rock, and human monsters, typifying evils, that wantonly destroyed human life.

Tabletop Games

• It's actually possible to do this in Call of Cthulhu, but it's very difficult to do so. One method involves summoning the God without his consent, which pisses it off but temporarily weakens it enough to be killed by extreme means. Case in point: Old Man Henderson summoning Hastur (which was possible because Henderson was his greatest enemy at the time) and then detonating "enough explosives wired to make Michael Bay blush".
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • 1st Edition
    • Under the rules (Deities and Demigods Cyclopedia) it was possible to kill deities, which led to bizarre results. One example was a letter to Dragon magazine in which a PC killed the Norse Mythology god Thor by pushing him off the top of a wall and getting Thor's magical hammer Mjölnir as booty.
    • Module Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits. A high level PC group could kill Lolth, the Demon Queen of Spiders, who was a lesser deity under the rules. If they did so her spider ship would cease to exist, but they would be saved and returned to the Prime Material Plane by their deities.
  • 2nd Edition
    • Legends and Lore supplement. Deities could only be killed by a more powerful deity or any deity using an artifact. Mortals could never kill a deity. Deities sometimes created avatars (lesser versions of themselves) to act on the Prime Material Plane. Avatars could be destroyed by mortals.
    • In the Planescape setting, the Lady of Pain slew Aoskar, Greater God of Portals. She then killed everyone who worshipped him, razed his temple and destroyed all written lore about him and mazed anyone who thereafter joined his faith, leaving only one priest alive (perhaps as a reminder). The priest? Was one of her own servants who turned from her to worship Aoskar, which is what kicked off her deicidal fit. She bars all gods from Sigil now, though Aoskar was really the only exception in the past anyway.
    • In the Dead Gods module for Planescape, the demon prince Orcus, after being slain by the drow demigoddess Kiaransalee, somehow returned as an undead demon prince under the name Tenebrous. Worse, he learned the Last Word, an utterance capable of slaying deities, and used it on Primus, god of the modrons, and the illithid deity Maanzecorian. A group of adventurers was able to use the power of the Last Word against Tenebrous, after which a group of greater deities nullified the Last Word's power.
  • The Vasharan, an Always Evil Human Subspecies introduced in the Book of Vile Darkness, are the descendents of mankind's Psycho Prototype, who upon being created by the deities almost immediately turned around and tried to murder them. Since the Vasharan are utterly amoral sociopaths, their desire to find a way to kill the gods is the only thing that holds their society together.
  • The 3.0 version of the Deities and Demigods book gave stats for many deities from a variety of pantheons, and made "god-hunting" a semi-popular sport among high-level parties. This was due to the fact that their stat blocks were poorly-optimized, making them far less of a challenge than their raw levels would suggest. An average high-level party could reliably kill pretty much any deity in the book, and walk away with a ton of xp for their trouble.
  • 4E has a few deities statted up (Bahamut, Tiamat, Torog, Lolth at least), and usually require you meet some special condition to permanently beat them down (either affecting them in some way that violates their portfolio, using something against their iconic material, or getting a bunch of Primordials/Demon Lords and having them gang up on them).
  • 5e largely did away with statting out gods. However, the edition's rules for the Forgotten Realms say it's technically possible to kill a god, but virtually impossible in practice. You'd need to go to the god's lair/domain, where they'd have Home Field Advantage in the form of Lair Actions. Then you'd have to kill them when they're both there and at full strength; should the god flee or force you leave their realm, you're out of luck. Even then, gods are immune to all but the most powerful of magic spells. What few stat blocks exist make the gods difficult for even a max-level character — they have a challenge rating of 30, and the max level for a Player Character is 20. And dying to a god in their realm means your soul is theirs to do with as they please. You might get a Klingon Promotion and their power for killing a god in the Forgotten Realms, but good luck pulling it off.
• Exalted is full of exaggeration, and this trope is no exception. You can trivially kill the vast majority of gods right out of chargen. And not only you can kill typical day-to-day house-spirit gods, you can also kill the Incarnae, who are the big bosses of the gods. And ultimately you can kill the Primordials, who are the gods of the gods. In fact, that last one was the very reason why the Exalted were created.
• For an RPG based on Gnosticism, this trope is averted in KULT. But only because God Is Dead.
• In Magic: The Gathering, the gods of Theros and Amonkhet have Indestructible, meaning they're immune to most effects that would destroy them (including damage). That said, Magic is notorious for its extreme literal rule set, meaning that exiling them still works (but see below).
  • In a more flavorful example, Deicide (whose art is the current trope image) is a card in Journey into Nyx that exiles an enchantment, where if you choose to exile an opponent's god, all other copies of that god in your opponent's hand, deck, and graveyard also get exiled.
    • Storywise, this is exactly what Elspeth does to the recently ascended Xenagos.
    • A fun fact: While this works on Therosian gods, it doesn't on Amonkhetu gods, since those gods are simply indestructible creatures, not enchantment creatures like their counterparts on Theros. It's still very possible to kill them via other means, however.
  • One way to deal with indestructible creatures like the gods of Amonkhet is by reducing their toughness to 0 with -1/-1 counters, which usually represent some form of infection or venom. This is how the gods of Amonkhet meet their end once Nicol Bolas' endgame for the plane is set in motion. He corrupted one of the brother gods by brainwashing him and replacing his head with a giant scorpion and then unleashed him against them. Even the gods are not immune to The Scorpion God's venom. In gameplay, this is shown by The Scorpion God's ability to place -1/-1 counters on any creature.
  • The story of Hour of Devastation sees Nicol Bolas kill four of the five gods of Amonkhet.
    • He later reanimates them into Eternals, super-powered zombies being used for the invasion of the plane of Ravnica. Unlike their living versions, the God-Eternals can be destroyed...but their controller has the option to tuck that God-Eternal back into their deck, third from the top, instead of letting them die. Uniquely, this also happens if the God-Eternal is exiled.
  • Unlike the gods of Theros and Amonkhet, the gods of Kaldheim aren't any more resilient than an average creature with their stats.
• The possibility of this is one of the major dividing lines between demigods and true deities in Pathfinder. Demigods, such as the various Demon Lords and Archdevils, all have stats and can be killed like any other powerful monster. They're pretty tough, and many of them have to be killed twice in quick succession before it'll stick, but the Lord British Postulate is in full effect for them. True deities, on the other hand, explicitly do not have stats and cannot be meaningfully harmed or otherwise affected by even the most powerful player characters. Gods can die in the setting, and have in the past, but it's a rare occurrence, and tends to involve events of world-shaking impact^note And note that, in this context, "world-shaking" is frequently Not Hyperbole. It doesn't happen because a high-level party loaded up on Game-Breaker tactics, bamfed into the god's sanctum, and nuked their HP down to zero.
• Games Workshop:
  • Warhammer; During The End Times, Nagash entered the Nehekharan Land of the Dead and killed Usirian, taking his place as Nehekhara's God of Death. He also planned on doing this with the Chaos Gods themselves, but their power and circumstance foiled Nagash's plans... at least until Age of Sigmar came around, and Nagash is back to his old plans again.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • When Slaanesh was born, he made straight for the Eldar pantheon and easily slaughtered all of them save for three. Isha, the goddess of healing, was saved by Nurgle (although given he's a Chaos god of disease who is physically repulsive in the worst possible way, madly in love with her and shows his affection by infecting her with disease, her current situation is arguably worse than death), Cegorach got away, and Khaine tried to fight him, either got his ass kicked or held his own until Chaos God Khorne arrived and knocked him out of the way so he could get a shot at Slaanesh, literally getting shattered into pieces, and now survives as a fragment in the heart of every one of the Eldar's craftworlds. Just a quick aside on the Isha/Nurgle thing. Yes, Nurgle does the whole 'infection' thing with Isha... but Isha in return does the whole 'curing' thing (which Nurgle does allow, of sorts).
    • The C'Tan, the "gods" of the Necrons, were almost wiped out by their former followers and several of their own, resulting in the last surviving C'Tan being broken into "shards". In the previous edition when the Necrons were still slaves to the C'tan, this was their ultimate goal: killing all life in the galaxy means no more emotion, meaning no more Warp, and therefore no more Chaos gods.
    • Although the exact details are hard to pin down, perhaps deliberately, this was the unstated goals of the Emperor at the beginning of his secular Imperium with his doctrine of his secular "Imperial Truth". Ironically, it was a lie, albeit well-intentioned, but still a lie. The Emperor had at least a middling knowledge of Chaos and the Chaos Gods, and hoped to quench them out by using this doctrine to ruthlessly suppress religious worship, particularly of the Chaos Gods (and possibly to prevent new gods bring born from the faith of believers). What he didn't count on was that the Chaos Gods could thrive on actions and feelings as well, nor would they be powerful enough and willing to meddle in material affairs to split his Imperium and bring him to death's door. Nearly ten millennia of cruising on the momentum of his initial crusade through the galaxy, without the Emperor's guidance, his Imperium has become a theocratic, dark parody of his vision. And the greatest irony of all is that the downfall was all started by his son Lorgar, who worshiped the Emperor as a god and inspired countless others to do the same, but Lorgar's rebuke by the Emperor made him turn to his people's old gods, the Chaos Gods, letting Chaos get its foot in the door and bring about the current state of affairs.
• Mythender is about people who have somehow gotten the power to kill gods (and godlike monsters) and are on a quest to rid the world of the whole lot of them.

Video Games

• This trope, combined with a "Save the World" Climax, has become so ubiquitous in JRPGs that a meme pokes fun at these games starting with a mundane errand and then escalating to defeating god in its climax.
  JRPGs be like
  Chapter 1: save a kitty
  Final chapter: KILL GOD
• Arc Rise Fantasia has the main characters kill the god of their world. Unlike the other examples however, God is most definitely NOT evil, but saving the world means that either they kill her, or she just disappears.
• Asura's Wrath has this as well. The Seven Deities started out as Magitek Cyborg members of a race known as "Demigods" — a Human Subspecies that is descended from humans who underwent Bio-Augmentation to manipulate Mantra, an ambient Power Source for the setting's Functional Magic, Ki Attacks, and Magitek — who decided to elevate themselves to full-on godhood by assassinating the emperor and pinning the murder on Asura, then kidnapping his daughter because of her unique ability at controlling Mantra. Asura is betrayed, his wife is murdered, and he is killed. He comes back, and he is pissed. Elevated to really ridiculous levels with Asura killing Chakravartin, a being that's not only the source of Mantra, and the embodiment of the Wheel of life and Samsara, but also is stated to have been the creator of the universe itself.
• In the Bayonetta series, the titular angel-slaying witch manages this feat, with some assistance. Twice, in fact. Once against Jubileus, God of Light, and once against Aesir, the God of Chaos. Each is the Final Boss; Jubileus of the first game, Aesir of the second. In the trailer for her Guest Fighter appearance in Super Smash Bros., she references this, referring to Palutena, the Goddess of Light in the Kid Icarus series, as "an endangered species".
• BlazBlue: Ragna finally gets to kill Terumi (who turns out to have been none other than Takehaya Susanoo) during the climactic fight of Central Fiction.
• After being free of its influence, Shu Shirakawa in Dark Prison has one thing in mind: kill the god who bound him in the first place. Surprisingly enough, killing said god was only a Disc-One Final Boss.
• In Dark Souls, you end up killing all of the deities save for the Furtive Pygmy mentioned in the opening cutscene. Granted, most of them are in pretty bad shape by the time you actually meet them. A few of the other bosses are minor gods as well, but they can be killed like any other enemy in the game. It helps that you're toting a chunk of the Dark Soul around, being a descendant of the Pygmy.
• In Dark Souls III, one of the Lords of Cinder is Aldrich the Devourer of Gods. That title isn't just for show either — he's eaten at least one god namely Gwyndolin. The Ashen One also becomes a god-slayer over the course of the game. The Nameless King is one of the last deities left in the world being the firstborn son of Gwyn whose identity was stricken from history as punishment for his betrayal, and he's an Optional Boss that can be fought and killed like any other enemy. The final boss is the Soul of Cinder: the embodiment of all those who Linked the Fire, including Gwyn himself. It is essentially the First Flame incarnate.
• Dishonored: Death of the Outsider has this as the premise in its title. It features a quest for Billie Lurk, reteamed with Daud, to find the artifacts that could kill the God of the Void. Being Dishonored, there's also an option to simply remove the Outsider as a god and make him a mortal once more.
• This is the purpose of the strategy games Dominions, currently in its fifth incarnation. You control a nation with a lesser physical god, be it a Titan, a Vampire Queen, or a Stone Monolith, as a playable unit. The goal is to eliminate all other gods and enforce monotheism, your theism. However, killing the physical form of the god is not permanent, belief will bring them back. Instead, the only way to truly kill a god is to get rid of its followers, whether through conquest or starvation.
• Overlapping with Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?, this is the entire reason the Grey Wardens were created in the Dragon Age 'verse: the archdemons are the slumbering gods of the Tevinter Imperium, awoken by darkspawn. If killed by a normal mortal, they'll come back to life via body surfing to the nearest darkspawn. If a Grey Warden is in proximity, however, it'll jump to the Warden and their souls will mutually annihilate.
• Doom Eternal
  • Near the end of the original campaign, the Doom Slayer casts down the Khan Maykr, the being who was once known as the Mother God of the Sentinel faith, making her pay for every soul that she's condemned to Hell for the sake of the Argent Energy that she made her deal with the Dark Lord of Hell for.
  • In the final battle of the Ancient Gods DLC, the Doom Slayer kills the Dark Lord of Hell himself, who is revealed midway through the final boss fight to be the original creator of the Doom universe, who was cast down by the Maykrs who feared what he would become and replaced with the being that we've known as The Father.
• Drakengard: At the end of each game, you're given an opportunity to hunt down an avatar of the gods. In 1 and 3, you can murder the real deal, though to the player it might be frustrating and unrewarding because the final battles are rhythm hell musical buttons minigames.
  • On a lesser note, 2B wonders about the god who created the cycle of life and death, implemented it in all things, especially androids (whose memories can be backed up but have developed serious neuroses about being killed and reprogrammed over and over), and hopes she can find this god and murder him. She never gets the chance, but depending on how one interprets shooting Yoko Taro's name in the Golden Ending, Pod 042 might have.
• In Dungeon Crawl, Gods Need Prayer Badly. Gods without intelligent followers will fade away. This makes it possible to kill Jiyva, the god of slime, by killing Royal Jelly, the only slime intelligent enough to worship. The other gods have enough followers to not be susceptible to this.
• In Dungeon Siege 3 Jeyne Kassinder revives one of the creator gods to fight the 10th Legion, but it's been corrupted by her rage and you kill it as the final boss.
• Elden Ring has Smithing Master Hewg, who has been given a task to forge a weapon capable of killing a god. You eventually do that by defeating the Elden Beast in the game's climax, likely using the weapons that Hewg has helped to upgrade.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • As part of the series' primary Creation Myth, Lorkhan, one of the et'Ada ("original spirits") convinced/tricked some of his fellow et'Ada to create Mundus, the mortal plane. However, this act caused these et'Ada to sacrifice a large portion of their divine power. As punishment for his perceived treachery, these et'Ada (now known as the Aedra, or "our ancestors" in Old Aldmeris), "killed" Lorkhan, tore his divine center ("heart") from his body, and cast it down into the mortal world he made them create where his spirit is forced to wander. (According to some myths, this was Lorkhan's plan all the long: to "die" and have his spirit "impregnate" the mortal world.)
  • In Morrowind, you'll be required to kill two, with a third being optional. In the main quest, your goal is to defeat Dagoth Ur. He actually is a truly immortal Physical God, and you cannot kill him in the standard way. Instead, you must cut of him off from his source of power, which kills him thanks to him having No Immortal Inertia. The second is Almalexia in the Tribunal main quest. Destroying Dagoth Ur's divine power source also cuts Almalexia off, allowing her to be killed in the normal sense. However, she's still a 4000 year old Magic Knight who was merely Brought Down to Badass, so it's still a god-level battle. Finally, Vivec is optional. Like Almalexia, he's an incredibly tough opponent (though, as revealed in later works, he was not canonically killed by the Nerevarine).
  • Killing Mehrunes Dagon in Oblivion is supposed to be impossible (he's got something like 10,000 HP and can stomp you to death without half-trying), but can be done if you A) abuse the Alchemy and Enchant skills to make a Game Breaking enchanted weapon, or B) get lucky with Wabbajack. Since it's not supposed to be possible, he has no actual death animation and most of his ragdoll doesn't even have physics, leading to his body collapsing directly downward into what's somehow both a puddle and a pile. Storywise, of course, he'll just respawn on the planes of Oblivion, like all Daedra do.
  • Skyrim:
    • The ending of the main quest subverts this. Alduin is defeated, but his soul is not absorbed by the Dragonborn. He will return, but only when he's meant to, at The End of the World as We Know It proper.
    • This is also part of the plan of the Thalmor-led Aldmeri Dominion toward Talos, the Deity of Human Origin who was formerly Tiber Septim (possibly among others). Their "official" explanation for banning his worship in the White-Gold Concordat, which ended the Great War between the Dominion and the Vestigial Third Empire, is that the Altmer believe they descend from the Aedra, and a man ascending to join their ranks is unacceptable to them. While it's only hinted at in-game, supplementary materials reveal that the real reason is because they believe the existence of Talos is the last thing holding Mundus, the mortal plane, together. They believe his existence in turn, depends on the worship of the races of Men. The Thalmor are religious extremists who play up the Altmeri religious belief that Lorkhan really screwed their divine ancestors over when creating the material world and that they should work to destroy that world to restore the divinity they had before there was a material world, and are seeking to Kill All Humans to accomplish that. Terrifyingly, there is some evidence in the series' lore that they may be right about this, however, opinions differ over whether the "unchanging stasis" of pre-creation is really "divine" at all.
• In EvilQuest, Galvis kills God himself before destroying the world.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VI has this, as well. The playable characters kill the three gods of magic; Goddess, Demon and Fiend, in order to bereave Kefka of his magical powers. However, it turns out after the Warring Triad had been felled that Kefka had drained them of so much of their powers, he was sustaining magic by himself, making him the God of Magic. He proceeds to lay waste the the world for shits and giggles - only to grow bored and mull over how he wants to go out and how many people he wants to kill doing so. Then the playable characters proceed to kill him, even able to use the very magic that is his domain because he's that suicidal.
  • In Final Fantasy VIII, if you have Odin on your side when you fight Seifer, he up and kills the poor guy right at the get-go. Fortunately, Gilgamesh shows up to finish him off, taking up Odin's sword.
  • Final Fantasy IX: Whatever Necron is, it represents the concept of Death. While Kuja is the Climax Boss, his unstable powers in Trance mode inadvertently cause something to happen that presents the party with a rare opportunity to meet the avatar of an abstract concept. They quickly discover his nature and motivations pisses them off and kill him.
  • In Final Fantasy XIII-2, this is what the villain is trying to do. He succeeds, partially because of you, causing The End of the World as We Know It. Yet there's still a third game.... Said third game does it again, except this time it's the Top God who gets taken out!
  • Depending on whether you consider Final Fantasy XIV's Primals to be gods, the Warrior of Light outright makes a habit of this. (Albeit somewhat downplayed, given that Primals are established as being capable of coming back to life if they get enough prayer and aether.)
  Warrior of Light: "Know that I'll kill your god if I have to. Maybe even if I don't."
  • Final Fantasy XVI: Ultima, a hive mind of immortal fae, created the world of Valisthea as an aether farm and a testament to his ego. His grand scheme was to create a physical vessel that could absorb the power of every elemental avatar for him to inhabit. It never occurred to him that he was creating the very being that could kill him. His narcissism was so great that when he discovered he was magically inferior to his vessel, he merged all his hive bodies and even unleashed his limit break - which exhausted his energy reserves and spare bodies, making him permanently killable.
  • Final Fantasy Dissidia involves the heroes and villains of different Final Fantasy titles on teams for Cosmos, the Goddess of Harmony, and Chaos, the God of Disorder. So that's a team of non-gods who have killed gods in their respective universes, under the command of a goddess versus wannabe gods, under the command of another god. Although, picking a single's battle with the all-powerful God of Chaos who easily kills off his opposite offers some entertaining exchanges.
  Chaos: Do not atone. JUST PERISH!
• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem Gaiden ends with the protagonist Alm stabbing the God of Power, Duma, right in his eye. However he is not killed, but rather accepts his defeat and withdraws from the affairs of humans.
    • The Gaiden remake, Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, changes things around a bit: Duma does die at Alm's hand, since he's falling victim to insanity and corruption; his last words have him warning Alm and Celica not to fall into his and Mila's mistakes.
  • Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn ends with Ike striking down the goddess Ashera, who petrified every living thing in the world except for those strong enough to endure it (aka, Ike and Micaiah's armies, among a very few others). However, she is not gone for good, and it's revealed postgame (if you partook in a pretty lengthy and obscure sidequest) that she returns several millennia after the game's end, merged back into her original form as Ashunera.
  • Subverted, in Fire Emblem: Awakening. While the player can kill Grima, who is worshipped as a god by an evil cult, it is also revealed that Grima isn't really a god at all but rather a powerful dragon pretending to be one. Years later, Echoes explains the rather complicated reasons behind this: Grima is actually an Ultimate Life Form, created by the Mad Scientist Forneus.
  • In Fire Emblem Fates the Greater-Scope Villain, Anankos, is a Dragon God that ends up being slain in the Golden Path.
  • In Fire Emblem: Three Houses it's revealed that Sothis was another dragon god who was butchered by Those Who Slither In The Dark and King Nemesis a thousand years before the events of the game when she was unconscious and in no condition to defend herself, although it's shown early on that she ended up being Not Quite Dead. In Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, if you prioritize Shez's revenge on Byleth over allying with them, events will conspire that see Sothis dying again as a spirit in control of Byleth's body courtesy of the player.
• This is the crux of the Fontaine arc in Genshin Impact, and an exaggerated version. More specifically, the God of Justice orders the execution of herself, along with the very throne of the God of Justice itself. All in an effort to twist the prophecy of Fontaine's doom and save the nation. Needless to say, this is one of the biggest Wham Episode of the game, since The Seven is now permanently The Six.
• God of War, of course. Kratos goes on a killing spree in Olympus as well as many other legends from Greek Mythology. Of course, killing the gods that govern the elements or the guy that guards the souls of the dead may have small inconveniences, but hey, no plan is perfect! By the time of God of War (PS4) Kratos has matured and regrets what he did due to the damage he inflicted upon the world. Though he still hates gods on principle, he is more wary of the consequences of killing them. And he still ends up killing three gods in that game, though one was killed at his own request (and later reanimated anyway).
• God of War Ragnarök: Sindri, technically a mortal, deals the killing blow on Odin for murdering his brother by smashing the marble containing his soul, leaving Odin Deader than Dead.
• One of the branching paths in Guardian Heroes allows you to storm the gates of Heaven and kill God.
• Hollow Knight: The Godseeker considers literally any boss to be a "God," but beings that could actually be considered this are far rarer. The Nightmare's Heart has an avatar who can be killed, but this is apparently part of how the Heart's life cycle works. The Pale King is found dead, presumably by the Radiance, and the best ending is gotten by killing the Radiance, permanently ending the Infection she gave as consequence for not worshipping her, and can only be gotten by obtaining the Void Heart, which allows you to control a black substance implied to be some kind of Anti-God.
• The point of Kid Icarus (1986) is to go from a weakling putto to badass so you can kill the goddess of darkness and save the goddesses of light. No wonder it's a difficult game. In Kid Icarus: Uprising, you get to fight Hades.
• In Kult: Heretic Kingdoms, the world's God was killed by a hero some time prior to the game. The player character belongs to an Inquisition which aims to stamp out any vestiges of worship. The sword which the hero used is an important item, as it seems to have been empowered by the act of killing God with it — and the game starts when it's stolen.
• Aatrox of League of Legends is out to kill anything that lives on Runeterra, including the Gods. And as revealed in Pantheon's backstory, he can. As he killed the Deity known as Pantheon in a fight, tearing the very stars out of the sky in doing so.
• The Sinistrals in the Lufia series claim to be gods, and they've got the power to back up that claim. They're also embodiments of evil, so the plot of the games usually revolves around finding the Dual Blade, a sword which can kill gods, and then kicking the Sinistrals' asses with it.
• Nasuverse: Stated to be possible, albeit extraordinarily difficult due to the level of power Divine Spirits can possess compared to just about everything else (though even this isn't ironclad, as there exist Divine Spirits so weak even a common Heroic Spirit would stand a good chance). Even Gilgamesh's completely overpowered weapon Ea is said to not be capable of killing a god, even though it could wipe out all life on Earth if used at full power (but even then he has several Anti-Divine Noble Phantasms stored in his Gate). Karna, however, possesses a one-time-use Noble Phantasm that can do it (Vasavi Shakti, which borrows the power of Indra for a brief moment), Scathach has earned particular renown for being a godslayer by virtue of being just that good (and her immortality), and Oda Nobunaga (at least in her Demon King Nobunaga form) is a specialized Anti-Divine Servant who can kill gods. In the backstory of Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star, the primordial God of War himself was killed in battle against the White Titan (Altera), who took his sword as a trophy, and then she went on to slaughter the other primordial gods before being slain herself by the fully-unsealed power of Excalibur.
• Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer gives you the opportunity to finish off Myrkul with the Spirit-Eater curse. This is also Death by Irony. Depending on the ending you get, you can become an unholy abomination of soul eating wrath. A large number of gods attempt to take you down as an affront to all existence but it's heavily implied that you consume so many, that they just decide to leave you alone.
• Androxus from Paladins gained his demonic powers from killing a malicious goddess. Who the goddess was, we don't know yet.
• Path of Exile goes hard into this trope with the Fall of Oriath expansion. Over the course of acts 5 through 10 the player characters kill a total of 14 gods. It helps that all the gods that appear were once human and ascended through their own power and ambition.
• The episodic series of Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness has the protagonists kill a god per episode. Exactly how dead they are afterwards is up for debate, though killing the last one triggers an "End of the World" Special.
• One of the earliest examples of deicide in a game, was SSI's Phantasie series. While your true enemy was the Evil Overlord, you can and should kill Anubis and Zeus whenever you have the opportunity. At various temples, there are statues of a lesser god or a greater god. If you start screwing around with the statues, eventually the god in question will get angry and incarnate to attack you. However if you kill the god, you get the best armour in the game (the godrobe) and the best or 2nd best weapon (the godsword if you take out Zeus and the godknife if it was Anubis). Since you can keep on blaspheming with these statues, eventually you can have a party completely kitted with divine equipment and making the fight with the dark lord a cakewalk.
• This is part of the immediate backstory in Pillars of Eternity where, 20 years before the events of the game, Eothas, god of redemption, walked the earth in physical form. He led a Raedceran army to invade Dyrwood so the Dyrwoodans prayed for the aid of Magran, goddess of war and fire. With her help their greatest smiths built a magic bomb called the Godhammer. It slew Eothas's physical manifestation and, even though his priests still wield divine power, he himself has not been heard from since and is presumed dead. One of your possible companions, Durance, is the last surviving member of the group that detonated the Godhammer, so he is the closest thing this world has to a god-killer. In the sequel Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire DLC Breath of Winter, you learn more about the event. It turns out Eothas knew about the Godhammer all along but chose to let himself be hit by it to show kith that the gods were not invincible. His vessel Saint Waidwen willingly went along with this since he trusted in Eothas.
• In Poacher, every religion's divine judge of the dead is actually the same entity: the Judge Of All The Earth, who is killed by Derek in the secret ending.
• Record of Agarest War 2 has Weiss, the first generation protagonist who kills a god and now must pay the price. Although he didn't get to actually kill Chaos because the real Weiss has been Dead All Along.
• The True Ending path of Record of Agarest War involves killing all six Dark Gods/Goddesses of Agarest to obtain true peace and happiness from an otherwise ill-fated false world of Agarest.
• This is the goal of the dwarf Doug in Rune Factory 4, as he was led to believe that she murdered his entire family. Luckily, he eventually learns better.
• This has been accomplished a few times in RuneScape.
  • A few of the setting's gods gained their divinity through acts of deicide: Guthix by killing Skargaroth, Bandos by killing Jododu Otoku and Zamorak by killing Zaros, although Zaros survived and regained his power after millennia.
  • More recently, Guthix the God of Balance was assassinated by Sliske (even though the rest of the Zarosian Mahjarrat had expressly declared they did not want to kill him), Bandos the War God was killed after a lengthy stand-off against Armadyl, a rival god, Tuska the World Eater was killed by Vorago after Tuska was sufficiently weakened by the Godless, and the Elder God Mah was euthanized by Seren after Zaros led a ritual to drain her power and transfer it to himself and the remaining Mahjarrat, which left Mah permanently comatose.
• Sacrifice sees the five gods of the world dropping like flies as the story goes on: Eldred kills at least two in every campaign, and Marduk inevitably kills the rest. It's explained to you that the gods you killed may return with a new name later as long as there are people to believe in the forces they represent, but the process takes centuries at best.
• SaGa series:
  • When you reach the end of The Final Fantasy Legend, your characters are not happy to discover that their entire adventure was a "game" the Creator set up for his own amusement, and demand to fight him. Thanks to a Good Bad Bug, the SAW weapon, which shows a chainsaw in its attack animation, can kill the Creator in one hit, and the Creator's death animation looks like he's being cut in half vertically. Because of this, The Final Fantasy Legend has become notorious for being the game in which you kill God with a chainsaw.
  • Final Fantasy Legend II doesn't include "God" as an enemy, but the MAGI your party are searching for are capable of transforming people into "new" gods, and you do fight and kill several of them.
• The Scribblenauts games let you spawn anything by writing its name, and that includes God. He is very strong and is a friendly NPC, but you can indeed kill him, with no particular consequence.
• The Shin Megami Tensei series has this alongside Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?, what with being able to fuse gods like Pallas Athena, Vishnu, or Amaterasu and getting them to fight other demons based on deities.
  • Shin Megami Tensei II ends with the protagonist slaying YHVH, an egotistical caricature of the Judeo-Christian God. He pays dearly for this after YHVH comes back.
  • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne has the protagonist defeat Kagutsuchi, a mere avatar of YHVH. However, by completing the secret True Demon ending, he ultimately becomes the general of a demonic army aiming to take down YHVH once and for all.
  • In the Digital Devil Saga series, as in many other games in the greater Shin Megami Tensei franchise, God (this time with a Hindu rather than Judeo-Christian flavor) is indeed the Final Boss of the series, but this time he's not evil and the main characters don't even want to fight him. They just came to ask him to please put the Earth back in orbit and return everyone's souls from the afterlife, but God insists that they fight him.
  • Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse has this as a central theme. The pagan god Dagda resurrects the protagonist with the express purpose to slay not only Merkabah and Lucifer, but the alliance of polytheistic gods led by Krishna. And by the end, YHVH falls by his hand, too.
  • The Persona series continues this trend, with the main characters fighting Nyarlathotep, Nyx, and Izanami. Of course, it takes two whole games to banish Nyarlathotep, you don't kill Nyx so much as seal her away, and Izanami seems rather pleased to have been defeated - though that doesn't diminish the sheer accomplishment of the main character killing her in a single blow.
    • A straighter example occurs at the end of Persona 5, where the Phantom Thieves go up against Yaldabaoth, a god of control formed from the public's collective distorted desire to have their lives and decisions made for them and not have to think for themselves. He can be described as having the personality of YHVH and the methods and motivation of Nyarlathotep. You eventually defeat him by getting the public to believe in you rather than him, allowing you to break your initial Persona Arsene's chains, causing him to turn into Satanael and gain a skyscraper-sized railgun which he shoots Yaldabaoth in the head with. All on Christmas Eve, to boot. And in the Updated Re-release Royal, he's not even the final boss!
• Smite: 'Deicide' is the term for Total Party Kill. As the game's theme is about Gods fighting each other, it fits. Though 'Deicide' only lasts until at least one God respawns at home base.
• Star Ocean: Till the End of Time: The second half of the plot deals with the party trying to stop The Creator from destroying the galaxy. Subverted in that he's actually a computer programmer, but he's still the closest thing to a god that the Star Ocean universe has
• Sunless Skies: The backstory involves a Steampunk London escaping to the heavens and killing a sun, which are the closest thing to deities in the Fallen London setting it spun off from. Multiple plot threads are spun into discovering how this happened, and "The Truth" ambition allows the Player Character to not only get to the truth of the matter but also perform the deed on your own, slaying The Sapphir'd King with aid from The Halved and the Spider-Senate in The White Well.
• Tales of Destiny 2: The heroes resolve to do this in the later half of the game. Especially Harold. They succeed after rejecting her presence and beating her down.
• Terraria Calamity features the Devourer of Gods, a massive, purple worm that does exactly what its name implies. Despite its name, it considers itself to be a god, though given that it assimilates the powers of those it eats, that may not be far from the truth.
• Total War: Warhammer III: At some point in the past, the bear god Ursun was imprisoned within the Realm of Chaos. A mortal Kislevite prince went to save him, but at the last moment turned to Chaos and shot Ursun with a magical bullet, seemingly killing the god. Some time later, it's revealed that Ursun survives albeit badly wounded, a prisoner of the Daemon Prince Be'lakor who seeks to drain his life and power as part of a revenge scheme against the Chaos Gods. The mission of the various factions is to find Ursun's prison and defeat Be'lakor, either to free Ursun and restore him to health or kill him and take his power for themselves — or, in the case of the Ogres, eat him.
• Warframe: The Orokin were feared by the Martian Sand People as greedy gods who stole their children. The Martians soon worshiped Inaros instead as the "Skykiller" after he began pushing the Orokin back and rescuing the stolen children, making him their god-king.
• The Xeno meta-series games usually have this as a plot staple:
  • Xenogears's plot comes down to this, with the main party facing off against the Physical God that created "humanity" from the genetic material of actual humans millennia ago.
  • The Xenosaga trilogy has a different twist on this with "God" actually being a benign, vaguely supportive force while the villain is a Physical God who's taken his self-imposed role as caretaker of the universe a step too far and has begun doing more harm than good.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 1 eventually leads to this, with the final showdown being against the god of Bionis and perpetual creator and destroyer of the world, Zanza. After beating him, however, the end-game cutscene reveals that he used to be a mortal human named Klaus working in a research facility in orbit around Earth, meant to attempt creating a universe — set in our world sometime in the future. When he initiated the creation, the existing universe was seemingly destroyed, and he ended up being a god in the new one.
  • In Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the villains are attempting to do this. Specifically Malos and Jin. Come the end of the game and it fails, though by that point Malos' goals change from 'killing his creator' to 'destroy all of humanity with giant mechas'. Although it turns out said god, The Architect, is already awaiting his death, as he's the other half of Klaus that remained on the devastated Earth and in the original universe after his experiment, and he knows that when Zanza dies he will as well.
• One ending in Yggdra Union has the eponymous character head to heaven to do just that.

Web Animation

• In the RWBY episode "The Lost Fable", Salem convinced the kings and queen of the world raise an army to help her kill the brother gods. It backfired big time.

Webcomics

• Attempted twice in Bob and George with the Author, who is essentially the God of the comic's universe. At the end of the first game storyline Dr Wily captures and seemingly kills the Author, erasing the comic from existence. It was quickly established the Author was only injured and recovered (at the time this was done because the Mega Man strips were meant to be filler and the Author did intend to stop them, but then wound up going back to them and they became the main story). In the final storyline, Bob attempts the same plan but takes it Up to Eleven by arranging for the Author to get killed in three time periods, ensuring his destruction. When George points out that Wily already tried killing the Author and failed, the Shadowy Author reminds him that since it's already known the comic is coming to an end there's no guarantee Bob's plan will fail this time (it does, but the point is still valid).
• A major plot point in Digger, though it doesn't come up until late into the comic's run. Interestingly, it's actually a Mercy Kill; the god in question is not the Big Bad, but its victim and host.
• Twilight Sparkle's goal for Princess Celestia in Friendship is Betrayal. Already done with Luna.
• Kill Six Billion Demons:
  • The old gods engaged in deicide amongst themselves on occasion, with at least one god (Hansa, god of cynics) being slain by another.
  • Provided Demiurges count, Allison will end up doing this. The title of the comic refers to the true name of a prophesized champion who will wield the ultimate weapon (a reality-warping brain implant), slay the ruling pantheon, and of course, cause the deaths of six billion 'demons'.^note The hell-spawned are typically called 'Devils' and not demons, so it's implied that all the death and devastation the protagonist and her party directly/indirectly cause by instigating chaos in the homes of the gods is where the death count comes from. As of book four, the protagonist indirectly doomed one goddess by destroying her personal fountain of immortality.
  • The current ruling pantheon of Demiurges came about because of a Great Off Screen War Divine Conflict in which all the Demiurges (mortals who had become god by planeswalking into heaven and obtaining one of God's 777,777 voices) went to war with each other to become sole ruler of Creation, winnowing their number down from almost a million to seven. This means all of the Seven Black Emperors are god-killers, and one of them, Jagganoth, is known as the "God-Eater". He very likely earned it.
  • A recurring character is the drunken mendicant knight Maya, whose true name means "Murder the Gods and Topple Their Thrones". She is eventually revealed to be a former champion of the god-war and a former member of the Black Emperors, and Student of the Principle Art of Cutting. Her life's goal is now to slay Incubus, her former friend and one of the Seven.
  • In Breaker of Infinities, Jagganoth lives up to his title by slaying two of the Seven and maiming the others. Solomon then reveals his Dangerous Forbidden Technique, a martial arts move designed to kill the actual gods should they somehow ever return. Despite literally puncing Jagganoth through four universes and trapping him in a magical black hole that imprisons souls, this is heavily implied to not be enough to stop him.
• In The Lost Oracle, one of the titular Oracles, a bridge between mortals and deities, slew a God. To say the Gods were displeased was an understatement. They nearly drove humanity to extinction before a compromise was reached.
• In The Order of the Stick, the Snarl outright killed the Eastern Pantheon (aka the Greek gods) immediately after it emerged. No wonder the remaining gods are pretty wary of it.
• In Penny Arcade Tycho recommends killing the gods of Gabe's ludicrously powerful Dungeons & Dragons group in an attempt to find something to frighten them. Unfortunately...
  Gabe: They killed their gods.
  Tycho: Why would they do that?
  Gabe: To ingest their godseeds.
• Return to Player: Probably Sehan's goal. He named the Guild he formed Deicide.
• Sluggy Freelance: The talking sword Chaz can kill just about anything when powered by innocent blood. It claims it could easily kill the Demon King, a God of Evil, and suggests that Torg use it to do that. We don't get to see this happen, but less direct contact with Chaz does scar the Demon King. In "Mohkadun", it's revealed that Chaz was brought into the mortal world for King Farahn to take revenge by killing the demigod Kron — which he did. Subverted earlier in the same story when Kozoaku impales Symachus the (physical) god of justice; Symachus even thinks he's killing him, but that's not his intention, and the god's Healing Factor saves him. That's what Chaz is needed to get around with Kron.
• Tower of God: Enryu killed the Guardian of the 43rd Floor, forever banishing the idea that the Guardians were immortal.
• In "Useless Dumb Fuck's redo" William pulls depth in words of the possibility of being a god who has killed a beast or that he his a beast who killed god only to have actually killed one.
• In Unsounded the Ssaelit religion agrees that the world was created by the Gefendur gods, but claims that when Ssael was killed he resisted the normal reincarnation mechanisms, traveled through the khert to find the Gefendur gods, and slew them. Ssael is considered the one god, having ascended to their former position.

Web Original

• This article from The Onion: Nasa Completes 52-Year Mission to Find, Kill God.
• Tales of MU gives us Gillian "Gottmorder" Callahan.
  Imperial Agent: The charges against you include three counts of attempted deicide...
  Callahan: One of those succeeded.
  Imperial Agent: We don't have a law that covers successful deicide.
• The Salvation War: The first story has humanity go to war with Hell and win so hard that it is later referred to as the Curbstomp War. Then we kill Satan with cruise missiles. The next story, we go to war with Heaven. The only reason that we don't personally kill God there... well... someone beat us to it.
  • The second chapter is even called Pantheocide.
• In the SCP Foundation universe, the Global Occult Coalition (an organization devoted to destroying the supernatural) traces its origin, in part, from a group of German occultists that supposedly killed the biblical God.^* It's on the tab marked "LTE: Liquidated Threat Entity", under "Access LTE-0913-Ex-Machina". (The article's more of a Feghoot actually.) Muddled by the fact that several SCP entries relating to Abrahamic religion seem perfectly fine, including an individual who may or may not be God Himself.
  • The Rat's Nest canon is a What If? story revolving around the GOC successfully killing God, which causes reality itself to gradually self-destruct.
• From Atop the Fourth Wall, Linkara is against the entity which is Missingno, who is described as an elder God. Linkara acknowledges that conventional combat does not work and only by critiquing is he able to defeat the entity.
• In the God of War skit of How It Should Have Ended, Kratos decides to move onto other gods after destroying the Greek Pantheon. He starts with Thor and Anubis and has a list that includes L. Ron Hubbard, Raiden and even Cthulhu. He draws the line at Morgan Freeman though.
• The Wanderer's Library has the entry Ascendor: Storming the Gates Tour 2014, which describes a band so metal that they kill a god at each concert they perform.
• The ultimate goal of Twitch Plays Pokémon Crystal was to fight and defeat Lord Helix and his followers. On the way there AJ and his team has casually downed Suicune, the Dome, and a fake Helix.
• In The Gamer's Alliance, what made Kagetsu the Dark Andain notorious was not only his open rebellion against the gods but also the fact that he was the first person in the Land of the Living to ever slay a god, which demonstrated that gods can in fact be killed even by mortals and demigods if the gods are fatally wounded while they're in their corporeal form.
• Agents of the Protectors of the Plot Continuum who specialize in hunting poorly written powerhouses occasionally have to kill those who happen to be gods or goddesses. This is especially common when it comes to Percy Jackson-verse Sues, who almost always end up being chopped up and thrown into Tartarus.
• Critical Role: During an ancient Divine Conflict that devastated the globe, The Magocracy of Aeor achieved the unprecedented feat of creating Magitek weapons that could destroy gods. The good and evil gods joined forces just long enough to wipe the city-state off the map before the knowledge could be used.
• SMPEarth:
  • The Ender Dragon, nicknamed Big Bertha, killed JoshA20, a server admin, who of course has near, if not full control over the server, making that the death of a Physical God.
  • TommyInnit also kills JoshA20 and then receives a command block, which he first uses to be a Gravity Master.

Western Animation

• Admiral Zhao in Avatar: The Last Airbender declares his ultimate goal to be the death of the Moon Spirit. He does succeed in this, but the Ocean Spirit takes its revenge on Zhao, and the Moon Spirit is quickly replaced/resurrected.
• The Legend of Korra:
  • Raava and Vaatu fight to the death every ten thousand years, though obviously it isn't permanent. Unalaq brutally slaughters Raava, while Korra later kills Vaatu via purification.
  • Attempted at the end of Book 3. Zaheer and the Red Lotus restrain and poison Korra in order to force her into the Avatar State and kill her, ending the Avatar Cycle. Korra manages to resist going into the Avatar State for some time, but once she does, breaks her chains and lays a feral beatdown on Zaheer until the poison finally does its work, only being saved at the last minute by Suyin metal-bending the metallic poison out.
• Steven Universe: The Diamonds are regarded as gods by Homeworld. During the Battle for Earth, Pink Diamond was slain by Rose Quartz. This may have been what instilled enough spite in the others to create the Cluster and to corrupt every single Gem on Earth, friend or foe. Ultimately, it turns no one killed her, though she is sort of dead.
• In some Transformers continuities, planet Cybertron is either destroyed or rendered uninhabitable because of a war between the Autobots and Decepticons. Keep in mind that Cybertron is, in some adaptations, their god Primus in disguise...
• This happens completely by accident and is Played for Laughs in Tripping the Rift. Chode travels to the beginning of time to find out the true origin of the universe and unwittingly runs over God with his spaceship. He fixes it at the end of the episode, though.
• Wakfu: This is the major goal of Season 3 Big Bad Oropo, who wants to wipe out what he views as a corrupt Jerkass Gods pantheon and replace them with "better" candidates pooled among the gods' own demigod children (though even In-Universe some of his choices are...questionable). His plan can be summed up as "open a portal to the homeworld of the gods, and then drop a Fantastic Nuke in there to cause an Earth-Shattering Kaboom".

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