The Anti-God

The Anti-God is actually pretty chill, just don't call her Dog.

"Suppose what your faith has said is essentially correct. Suppose there is a universal mind controlling everything, a God willing the behavior of every subatomic particle. Now, every particle has an anti-particle, its mirror image, its negative side. Maybe...this universal mind resides in the mirror image instead of in our universe as we wanted to believe. Maybe he's anti-God, bringing darkness instead of light..."

— Professor Howard Birack, Prince of Darkness

A Cosmic Entity that is roughly as powerful as the setting's monotheistic God — or, in non-monotheistic settings, the God of Gods equivalent — and is His antithesis. In other words, if God Is Good then the Anti-God will be evil, destructive, corrupting, and so on, and if God Is Evil, the Anti-God would be good, creative, nurturing, and the like. They are completely opposite of one another, but each one has an equally valid claim to the title of "Ruler of All." In stranger cases, this can also play into Blue-and-Orange Morality, where the prime God represents the Blue side and the Anti-God represents the Orange side (...or is it the other way around?). The relationship between the two may be one of harmony or of rivalry. A Balance Between Good and Evil may also be involved.

If only two gods exist, and both are antithetical opposites of each other, then the Anti-God is likely to be the God of Evil but this is not always the case. It's possible that the Anti-God is a God of Good and they may not be equal. Rough equality of power (or, alternatively, importance in the greater scheme of cosmic order) between the two opposite entities is mandatory at the minimum, thus why e.g. Morgoth/Melkor is not The Anti-God to Eru Ilúvatar despite being the God of Evil.

Several modern depictions of Satan elevate him from being merely the most powerful and/or influential of all demons/devils or Fallen Angels to this trope. Characters based on Satan are also portrayed this way. On the other hand, the Anti-God is sometimes portrayed as a separate entity from Satan (or the setting's equivalent), usually as his master and/or the one who corrupted him in the first place.

This is called bitheism/ditheism/duotheism in Real Life, with bitheism being the "harmonious duality" type, ditheism denoting "eternal rivals" type, and "duotheism" denoting the situation where the two deities are of opposite genders.

Compare Satanic Archetype and Demiurge Archetype. May overlap with Destroyer Deity if their counterpart is The Maker.

Not to be confused with A God I Am Not. See also The Antichrist for the Anti-God's version of the messiah.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Touma from A Certain Magical Index. His Imagine Breaker absorbs literally every type of supernatural power, be it holy or otherwise, with it even being able to cancel out the grace of God, as Index puts it.
• The Gods of Destruction from Dragon Ball Super are opposites of their respective universe's Supreme Kai who is a God of Creation. They're all working for the same employer, and are supposed to cooperate with their opposite numbers (not least because they both share the same lifespan), but the quality of their relationship varies from universe to universe.
• In Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion, in an attempt to save Madoka, Homura Akemi becomes the Devil to Goddess Madoka. Though she is also a Satanic Archetype, her power is great enough to qualify her for this trope (given that she manages to "break" the Law of the Cycles and separate Madoka's mortal self from it).

Comic Books

• Blackest Night: Nekron is the The Personification of Death (One of many) but before that he was the darkness that existed before the world began, then The Entity was born and the universe came into existence. His goal is to restore the world to how it was before the Entity showed up.
• Black Hammer: The Big Bad is even named Anti-God, as befitting an Expy of Darkseid.
• Chaos War: Amatsu-Mikaboshi, who was previously thought of as only the Japanese god of evil, is revealed as the personification of the Primordial Chaos that predated the universe. Eternity (the Anthropomorphic Personification of the universe itself) explicitly calls the Chaos King this trope, and states he cannot help the heroes, as without Amatsu as the other side of the coin, he will cease to exist, despite the King's victory meaning he will be destroyed either way.
• Clive Barker's Next Testament: The series has two anti-gods. Of course, God Is Evil, so this turns out to be a good thing.
• Crisis on Infinite Earths: The Anti-Monitor originally took on the role to The Monitor, one wanted to observe the multiverse, the other wanted to destroy it. Their origin has since been retconned multiple times but he's still referred to as an "Anti-God".
• The Defenders: Defenders (2021) introduces the Anti-All, a draconic personification of the Void that existed in the Third Cosmos, predating science, magic, and even arbitrary concepts and battled Lifebringer One for the fate of the nascent Multiverse. he was the first Devourer of Worlds before Galactus, Abraxas and The Black Winter and his fight with Lifebringer One would continue throughout all of existence in such forms as Chaos King's conflict with Eternity (see above), and Knull's with the God of Light.
• Doom Patrol: The Decreator is also known as Anti-God, the first shadow cast by God's light. Once awakened, it will unmake all existence. It awakens, but the Doom Patrol alongside Kipling manages to halt the unmaking of the universe to such a crawl that it becomes indistinguishable from entropy, essentially cancelling it out.
• The Incredible Hulk: The Immortal Hulk introduces the anti-thesis of the One Above All - the One Below All. They are, as explained in the final issue, one and the same, with The One Below All being the One Above All's Hulk persona.
• Swamp Thing: The Great Evil Beast acts as the Anti-God, the darkness from before God declared "Let There Be Light" cast off and ultimately striking back; The Spectre, God's right-hand man, extended to full size and larger than a continent, is barely the size of its fingernail. Before it can destroy reality however, Swamp Thing convinces it that light and darkness must exist in a balance, and it and God join hands, implicitly unifying with one another and rectifying the order of good and evil in the universe to a greater degree than in the past.
• Transformers: Unicron got his origin as a god-like entity in the Marvel UK comic series. He tells Death's Head of his origin as a primal force of evil, leading an army of dark gods against Primus and a battalion of light. Over the years and retellings, the broad strokes of this origin have become his official origin.

Film

• In keeping with its portrayal of Kaiju as eldritch, godlike beings, Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) portrays King Ghidorah in this light; an equal and superior opposite force to Godzilla, a false king that could easily destroy everything and reshape it to his liking.
• Although in the end it's just a joke Benji makes, as part of the ongoing mystery that is never really resolved about the "Rabbit's Foot" on Mission: Impossible III, he mentions that one of his college professors liked to talk about a theoretical Weapon of Mass Destruction (of the variety that could end the world in one fell swoop) that he called by this exact term.
• Prince of Darkness, where Satan (who is apparently also The Antichrist) is merely The Dragon to a far more powerful force of evil known only as the "Anti-God".

Literature

• Animorphs: Crayak effectively takes on this role in opposition to the Ellimist, who, for all intents and purposes, is a god. It's established that almost everything that occurs in the series is one big chess match between the Ellimist and Crayak. Even though Crayak's existence by itself is not purely in opposition to the Ellimist, his characterization through the entire series is basically one long game between the two.
• A Batalha do Apocalipse: Tehom, a primordial being of darkness, chaos and evil, was the opposite of Yahweh, who represents light, order and good. Because of that, they fought each other in the Primal Battles for control of reality, which culminated in Tehom's destruction.
• The Chronicles of Narnia: In the apocalyptic final installment, Tash is established as the Evil Counterpart of Aslan. Since Aslan is another form of Jesus, this would make Tash The Antichrist, especially since his summoning helps bring about The End of the World as We Know It. That said, Tash is portrayed more as this trope than as an Antichrist (while the Antichrist role is occupied by Puzzle the donkey, Shift the ape playing the role of the False Prophet who tries to pass himself off as Aslan's mouthpiece). Whereas your typical Antichrist is a mortal or at least partly mortal Dark Messiah, Tash is a full-on God of Evil resembling a pre-Abrahamic Middle Eastern idol and, whereas your typical Antichrist is usually born around the time of Armageddon or the lead-up to it, Tash has apparently been around long before that — he may even be as old as Aslan, since he's described as an equal opposite, the yin to Aslan's yang. Plus, since Christian theology traditionally views God and Jesus (and the Holy Spirit) as one and the same, the Antichrist/Anti-God distinction might be muddled the same way the Christ/God distinction is.
  Aslan: "...we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him, for I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted."
• In The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Lord Foul the Despiser is explicitly defined as the Evil Counterpart of the Creator, varyingly described as the Creator's son or twin brother (owing to being, according to the mythology, the Creator's Enemy Without, it's kind of difficult to accurately sum up their relationship in human terms). ^note  Other gods are implied to exist in the cosmology, and at least one- the Lover- figures into the backstory between the Creator and the Despiser. However, no divinity other than these two has an active role in the story. It's also implied that every god by definition has his or her Anti-God counterpart, with the Lover's being Indifference.
• In his Confessions (Saint Augustine), St. Augustine admits that he used to believe in a "a body of darkness." This "body" was a sentient force of physical evil that fights with the mildly stronger, spiritual force of good called "God." Eventually, Augustine realized that for this darkness to fight with God, God would need to be able to be injured and killed, meaning He couldn't be immortal or omniscient. Since those traits are essential to God, Augustine rejected the whole concept of an Anti-God for its nonsense.
• In T.E.D. Klein's novella "Nadelman's God", a young author writes a story about a god he conceives as the Abrahamic God's natural opposite. The story is set years after he's retired and become a successful businessman, where he learns that the god is real, and eager to serve Nadelman. Unfortunately, it believes Murder Is the Best Solution to Nadelman's problems.
• In Galactic Pot-healer by Philip K. Dick, the Cathedral is dedicated to Amalita, and it only became sunken because Amalita was feeling lonely and created his own anthithesis, Borel, to have someone he could love. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
• Good Omens: Death, real name Archangel Azrael, the leader of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, is revealed to be this. Unlike his compatriots, who are manifestations of humanity's greatest ills, Death is "creation's shadow", and thus cannot be destroyed without taking the universe with him.
• Subverted in Mistborn. Ruin is initially presented as this to Preservation, two gods who are complementary opposites and together created the world; when the balance is thrown off between them, bad things happen (in the books, the balance gets thrown too far Ruin's way, nearly leading to The End of the World as We Know It). However, later works set in The Cosmere show that Ruin and Preservation themselves were only two fragments of a much more powerful god called Adonalsium- sixteen such fragments (called Shards) exist in total, and none of them can properly be called God or Anti-God.
• The Reynard Cycle: Hydra, the Destroyer, is a multi-headed dragon goddess symbolizing chaos, destruction, natural disasters, and water in general. She is opposed by a solar goddess called Fenix.
• The Riftwar Cycle: This is the ultimate nature of the Dread, as revealed in Magician's End.
• Second Apocalypse: the spacefaring sex monsters called Inchoroi have discovered that slaughtering almost everyone in Earwa and creating the "No-God" will forever seal reality off from the other side, protecting their souls from entering hell. They failed during the first Apocalypse, but now they're trying again.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • One of the major religions features two gods, constantly at war: the fire god R'hllor, Lord of Light and Shadows, who likes having people burned as a sacrifice to him, but is a pretty good god (for a Crapsack World). Then you have the Great Other, his enemy, lord of cold and darkness, who represents all evil in the world. This religion also denounces all other gods as either not existing or being faces of the Great Other.
  • A more minor ditheistic religion in the same world is the religion of the Ironborn. They worship the aquatic "Drowned God", who they believe first breathed life into humanity and whose constant enemy is the destructive, chaotic Storm God. Again, this being a Crapsack World, one of the ways they worship the Drowned God is by drowning people, although they have the decency to revive most of them afterward. As the Ironborn are descendants of the First Men just like the polytheistic Northmen, they likely believe that the Northmen's Old Gods exist, they just don't particularly care.
  • It's theorized that these two faiths may just be worshipping the same pair of opposing deities by different names and faces. The Storm God and R'hllor are both embodiments of raw energy and destructive change (as represented by storms and fire), while the Drowned God and the Great Other embody coldness and darkness (in the depths of the ocean and long winter nights). Though almost no direct interactions between followers of the religions are depicted in the story, they would naturally be at odds with each other since they would each consider the other faith's primary deity as the antagonist to their own.
• Sword of Truth: The Keeper of the Underworld is the polar opposite from the Creator (at least per belief, since the latter never appears). He is the God of the Dead and God of Evil who loathes everything living, while the Creator's held to be a benevolent being who made all things (except the Keeper, perhaps).
• The Unmaker from The Tales of Alvin Maker is a Destroyer Deity with and Anthropomorphic Personification of entropy. He's the polar opposite of God/The Maker.
• In The Tamuli, it turns out Bhelliom is an essentially benevolent and intelligent divine force, even referring to the world as its daughter and outmatching most of the other gods in raw power (although it does have to submit to the will of a god wielding it—it's complicated), which makes its malevolent opposite Klael the Anti-God. They're so evenly matched they need to resort to Combat by Champion towards the end, because to do otherwise would risk destroying the world.
• The Dark One of The Wheel of Time, equal and opposite of the Creator, embodiment of evil, destruction, chaos, and paradox, who takes the form of an infinite void and a voice that speaks in ALL CAPS. However, given that the Creator presumably both created and imprisoned the Dark One, they may not be equal in power.
• Wraith Knight: The King Below is considered the equal and opposite to the King Above, representing chaos, madness, darkness, and evil to the King Above's order, logic, light, and good. This proves to be significantly more complicated than it appears as the Lawgiver proves to be a tyrant while the King Below seems more mischievous than actually evil. Then we discover they were actually allies the entire time.

Live-Action TV

• B-Fighter Kabuto has the Will of Darkness, a primordial force of chaos of evil opposed to the Will of Light, the embodiment of creation and life. It's also the Greater-Scope Villain which spawned both the Melzard Tribe and the Big Bad of the preceding series to carry on its plans.
• In Doctor Who, the Black Guardian could be considered this if you consider the White Guardian to be the God of Good.
• Good Omens (2019): Like his novel counterpart, Death is described as "creation's shadow", and thus cannot be destroyed or discorporated.
• In Kamen Rider Agito, we find out the Big Bad's nature later in the series: he is the Overlord of Darkness, the creator of humanity, and wants to destroy all those with powers, as they could eventually reach the level of our hero (one of the rare examples of someone whose "seed of Agito" has fully matured) and win humanity's freedom from him. That pretty much makes God the villain of the series and the Overlord of Light, who proves to have been the one who granted these powers by placing a small part of himself inside every human, the anti-God. The Overlord of Light, being the one who leads humans to rebel against their creator, becomes a bit of the Satanic Archetype even while being the good guy. After all, "Lucifer" stands for "Bringer of Light"...
• Legend of the Seeker: The evil Keeper of the Underworld wants to destroy all living things, in contrast to the benevolent Creator.
• Supernatural:
  • Death is (initially) portrayed as God's equal and antithesis, with God as the creator, and Death as the ender. As the Anthropomorphic Personification of all death in the cosmos, he is far more significant than most of the pagan gods in the series, who are more regular monsters with fancy titles. The Grim Reaper and God have both existed for so long that they can't even remember anymore which of the two came first, but Death thinks he will have to reap even God when creation ends. However, unlike other examples of this trope he is neither evil nor particularly destructive (aside from his "reaping"), and is in fact one of the more benign entities in the show and possesses a dislike of the natural order being thrown into chaos.
  • Season 10 also introduces the Darkness, a primordial entity of destruction and chaos that is sealed inside the Mark of Cain, which has just been set free. The Darkness is made even more Anti-God by the fact that God chooses to appear as a normal adult human male named Chuck, while the Darkness appears as a newborn girl (who begins rapidly aging into a gorgeous human woman) named Amara. And then, it is revealed that the Darkness is actually God's sister. While she isn't completely evil, and God is not completely good, there does need to be a Balance Between Good and Evil. Neither of them can be killed without destroying reality. However, they can perform a Fusion Dance, as shown when Chuck makes a pact with Amara to become one entity again in season 15, except Chuck seems to be the dominant personality.

Multimedia

• The Makuta of BIONICLE was conceptualized as this originally — Mata Nui represented Creation while his "brother" Makuta was Destruction that allowed Creation to take place. Makuta referred to himself as Nothing, a personified abstract concept whose domain was the Void. This persona was abandoned because LEGO thought it was too esoteric and not marketable as a toy, thus Makuta was revealed to be part of a species that served Mata Nui (making them brothers figuratively) by creating wildlife and protecting peace before turning bad, and his actual name was Teridax. The idea was however revisited when Teridax managed to usurp Mata Nui and take over his body, making himself an evil god for the series climax.
• Unicron serves as the Evil Counterpart of Primus in the Transformers franchise.

Mythology and Religion

• Zoroastrianism is an example, with its two primary deities Ahura Mazda or Ohrmazd ("Lord/Mighty Wisdom"), the equivalent of the monotheistic God of Abrahamic religions, who possesses the Spenta Mainyu ("bounteous spirit"), and his antithesis Angra Mainyu or Ahriman ("destructive spirit"). Here, Ahura Mazda is a God of Gods-type Top God, with the lesser gods under him being akin to the Abrahamic religions' angels, while Ahriman is a sort of great spirit embodying evil and darkness, the nearest to an Anti-God. Ironically, according to Zoroaster, Ahura Mazda has already gained the advantage over his antithesis and his final victory is a foregone conclusion; we unfortunately have to endure the Anti-God's final acts of spite and then its death throes.
• Believing the Abrahamic God and the Devil are equal opposites, as some Gnostic sects did, is viewed in Christianity as heretical, as the orthodox Abrahamic position is that God has no equal, opposite or otherwise. God is singularly responsible for creating the totality of existence, including the Devil, so the Devil cannot possibly oppose Him on an equal footing like he wants. As well, theologian C. S. Lewis once pointed out that if you took away every possible "good" attribute, that would have to include intelligence, personality, autonomy, and even existence, so there's nothing left for a pure Anti-God to be! This is Older Than They Think - ever since St. Augustine, the Church stance is firmly that evil is negative (lack of something), rather than positive (something). St. Augustine, in turn, got the idea that existence is itself something good and so pure evil doesn't exist from pagan Neoplatonists like Plotinus and Porphyry, as there are suggestions of it in Plato.
  • The very concept of Sin itself may be the anti-God, that is opposite in every way. God is a Person, Sin is not a person. God is a fulness, Sin is an absence. And so on.
• Manichaeism was a late-Antiquity Gnostic religion that taught the existence of a divine struggle between the Father of Greatness and the Prince of Darkness that has been going on since before the universe was created. It gained popularity as far west as Gaul and as far east as China before eventually dying away due to persecution by Christianity and Islam (in the West) or by the Imperial Chinese government— though it did survive in China as late as the 14th century.
• Directly challenging Brahman (God) is not conceivable in most Hindu cosmologies, but challenging the forces functioning in the universe closest to God, the Devas, is, and an ambitious Asura is often up to the task. Linguistically, Asura may have once been a neutral term meaning "might"^note It's interesting to note that the "ahura" in Ahura Mazda (see Zoroastrian entry above) is descended from the same Indo-European root world as "asura". and individually, Asuras have many origins but the actions of the clan Asura and its associates caused the word to mean "anti-god". Bali (directly from the clan), Tripura (a monster accidentally created by a holy man who tried to raise it right but rampaged through the worlds of the devas after Ganesha blessed it out of pity) and Ravana (one of the all-devouring Rakshasa banished to Earth who established an empire there poised to conquer all the worlds) are but three examples who temporarily disrupted how the universe functioned, though the latter is more sympathetic than most examples since it was his dedication to the Trimurti that lead him to his position, it's just he became Drunk with Power. This anti-god position periodically changes as they are always killed or pacified eventually.
• In Buddhism, Mara, the "King of Demons", is also described by Nyanaponika Thera as "the personification of the forces antagonistic to enlightenment" which would make it the Anti-Buddha.
• Palo religion has Nzambi and Lungombe, though they are technically different aspects of the supreme creator deity. Lungombe is all of the negatives, Nzambi is the positives.
• Most lunar or night deities, which are the dark opposite to the solar or day deity (usually in a The Sacred Darkness way). Various esoteric schools, from Chinese Yin-Yang philosophy to western alchemy to Dogon cosmology, show the sun and moon to be primordial deities/aspects of divinity that have a role in creating and defining the universe's opposing sides.

Tabletop Games

• Anima: Beyond Fantasy: C'iel, Goddess of Light, and Gaira, God of Darkness. While both share the same goal, basically to bring order to the world, the differences between them are how they want to obtain it, the former defending life and the latter the strongest ruling over the weak.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Ao is from the Forgotten Realms and Tharizdun is from Greyhawk, but since Greyhawk lacks an ultimate good god (though Ao is more True Neutral) and Forgotten Realms lacks an ultimate evil god, Tharizdun could be read as an Anti-God to Ao's God.
  • Bahamut/Paladine and Tiamat/Takhisis are the god of good dragons and goddess of evil dragons, respectively. In Dragonlance in particular they are the most active deities in the fiction.
• Exalted: The Unconquered Sun to the Ebon Dragon. As the incarnation of treachery, corruption, and general Jerkass-itude, the Ebon Dragon was forced to create the Unconquered Sun just so that he could have something to betray, corrupt, and be a Jerkass towards.
• In Nomine:
  • Some demons worship Lucifer as a dualistic evil counterpart to God. Lucifer himself doesn't mind this (especially if it keeps his minions too scared to try anything), but he personally knows better. The books make it clear that while no one knows exactly what he can or can't do, he is limited in ways that God is not; he still has to use Essence to enact his will even if he does have a whole lot of it, he can't force souls to go to hell, he can't inflict or remove Dissonance on angels without their consent, and he cannot change the fundamental nature of a soul (so he can't turn humans into demons or vice versa).
  • Ironically, Kronos, the Prince of Fate, is likely the closest example in the setting despite nominally being one of Lucifer's servants. He's still connected to the divine Symphony in a way other demons are no longer capable of, can infiltrate Heaven and is in at least some sense a true higher power distinct from regular angels and demons. It's strongly implied he's a fallen aspect of God, putting him well above his alleged master.
• Warhammer Fantasy Battle:
  • The four major Chaos Gods and an indeterminate number of lesser Chaos Gods are in an eternal war with one another for the stuff of anti-creation that they were formed from (called, well, Chaos). Malal is a deity that formed from the Chaos gods constantly fighting each other, making him the Chaos god of Chaos fighting itself, and he attacks the forces of the other deities almost exclusively. He could make a huge, if mostly subtle, change to the flavor of Chaos, except that it was unclear who owned the intellectual property over him, and he was largely removed from the canon.
  • Later mateiral introduced Necoho, god of Atheism. Chaos gods reflect the emotions and sentiments of mortals, including disbelief. Where the other gods get stronger with more worshipers, Necoho gets stronger with fewer people who believe he actually exists. He's described as wearing a permanent expression of comic amusement, since he knows he's a walking paradox; his ultimate goal would be to become the only deity in existence, but since that would require killing off all mortal creatures, he's sort of limited to undermining the worship and credibility of other deities for the time being.

Video Games

• In the Castlevania series, Dracula is eventually revealed to be the antithetical opposite to God as part of the Balance Between Good and Evil. While God's actual degree of power has not been demonstrated or elaborated upon, Dracula himself is the most powerful being to be ever shown in the series, going as far as to have the Grim Reaper himself as his own right-hand man.
  • Chaos fits the bill, as well. It's literally the very source of Dracula's immense power, and can choose other Dark Lords if necessary. Helps that it's a full-blown Eldritch Abomination, too.
• Cosmos and Chaos in Dissidia Final Fantasy are such a pair. No points for guessing which is good and which is bad. Also played with as Chaos wasn't evil before the cycle began and he's mostly bored with the conflict, while Cosmos became good after she stopped following Cid's will to sacrifice her warriors to empower Chaos.
• In Dragon Age, the Forgotten Ones serve as these to the Creators in the Elven pantheon, who fought an endless war against each other. Elven legends tell that Fen'Harel, the Dread Wolf is a even better example of this, having used his perceived kinship by both sides to trick them into sealing themselves away, while he supposedly arranged to defeat the other. However, this is ultimately subverted. You meet the Dread Wolf in Dragon Age: Inquisition, and he clearly states that he didn't do any of that (one of the Creators backs him up on this). The Forgotten Ones and Creators weren't gods, either.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • Anu and Padomay are the anthropomorphized primordial forces of "stasis/order/light" and "change/chaos/darkness", respectively, often being depicted as brothers. Their interplay in the great "void" before creation would lead to creation itself, sometimes anthropomorphized as the female entity "Nir". Both Anu and Padomay loved Nir, but she ultimately favored Anu, which Padomay hated. Angered by her rejection, Padomay killed Nir and shattered the 12 worlds she had created. Anu wounded Padomay and presumed him dead, so Anu salvaged the pieces of the 12 worlds into one: Nirn. Padomay was not dead, however, and returned. He drew blood from Anu as he attempted to destroy Nirn, so Anu pulled them both outside of time in order to protect Nirn. In the various religious traditions of the Tamriellic cultures, Anu and Padomay are considered a version of The Old Gods, with Anu as the God of Gods for his role in protecting Nirn while Padomay becomes the "Anti-God" for his attempt to destroy it.
  • Sithis, the "Great Void", embodiment of chaos, and primordial "Is-Not", is what is left of Padomay (or may even be Padomay according to some cultures). Sithis is venerated by most cultures throughout Tamriel as a force of change, though outright worship is rare.
• Final Fantasy XIV has Zodiark, the God of Darkness and patron deity of the Ascians, who is pretty much a dark mirror of Hydaelyn, the Goddess of Light. From the Ascians' perspective, though, Zodiark is the "One True God", and Hydaelyn is a usurper. As it turns out, they're not totally wrong: Hydaelyn was actually created after Zodiark, specifically to counter him and be his opposite; making her the Anti-God in this situation. After Zodiark was sundered and sealed, Hydaelyn took his role as the Will of the Planet instead and then went on to empower mortal heroes against Ascian machinations; making this one of the rare cases where the Anti-God is the positive one.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, the Demon King Demise is the opposite of the God of Good Hylia. Hylia wishes to protect humans and make the land a rich place, while Demise wants to Kill All Humans and turn the land into a wasteland of monsters. And eventually, Demise incarnates himself (or more accurately, his hatred) into a mortal form (Ganondorf) much like how Hylia incarnated into Zelda.
• Oracle of Tao has the Ancient One, a hooded ghoul who rules the void. God isn't really good or evil, but rather has Blue-and-Orange Morality of some sort. The Ancient One, on the other hand seems to be merely territorial, destroying whatever is nearby. God is ruler of all existence, the Ancient One is ruler of nonexistence. Supposedly the two are equally powerful, but this may be an Informed Attribute, because God's power is never tested in battle, and there are stronger enemies out there.
• Nyarlathotep of the Persona series. Philemon is the Anthropomorphic Personification of humanity's creative urges and upward-striving nature, while Nyarlathotep embodies humanity's self-destructive and hateful tendencies. They maintain a Balance Between Good and Evil because they're roughly equally powered and if one was to act directly, the other would immediately work to undo it.
• Giratina could well be this to the Pokémon games, acting as this to Arceus.
• Most of the gods in Sacrifice count, except for James who is the least war like of the rest. Charnel is the god of slaughter and revels anyone killing anyone. Pyro is warmongering god who thinks himself as superior to the rest.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Depending on the game, Lucifer may or may not be this. In Shin Megami Tensei II, for example, he's merely the strongest demon and an advocate of Chaos, who YHVH obliterates without any trouble. In Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, however, Lucifer is an all-seeing, all-knowing Chessmaster with nigh-limitless power: a primal force of Chaos itself to counteract YHVH's Law, the Great Will's equal and opposite.
• Dark Gaia in Terranigma.

Webcomics

• In The Order of the Stick, the Snarl is the nemesis and antithesis of all the three pantheons of the world^note there used to be four until the Snarl destroyed one, created by their disagreements when building their first world. So there are multiple gods with conflicting attitudes and natures, but the Snarl is the opposite number of all of them. In terms of power as well, it has them at a stalemate: they are able to temporarily contain it, but never fully stop it, and it would stomp them in a straight-up fight.
• Sluggy Freelance:
  • The dimension that came to be the Dimension of Pain was once ruled by the Goddess of Goodness, until it was taken over by the Demon King and his demonic minions. That makes him the anti-god of that dimension (as well as its ruling god).
  • In the main dimension of the stories, according to legend that has a good chance of being correct, something called The One created two opposing "Pillars of Reality" called the Creator and the Destroyer, with the Creator going on to create the first non-capital-G gods to help it stop the Destroyer undoing its work every time. This leaves the two below God but above the gods of the world, with the Creator being a God of Gods, so the Destroyer qualifies as the Anti-God in a polytheistic but not monotheistic sense.

Web Original

• In The Salvation War Humanity has this role. Granted, it's solely because Heaven and Hell are actually Ancient Astronauts, but the human race has advanced enough that it's more than a match for the entire Abrahamic Pantheon.

Western Animation

• The Legend of Korra introduces Vaatu, who serves as this in opposition to Raava.
• Miraculous Ladybug has Plagg, who's the Dark Is Not Evil equal and opposite to Tikki in a bitheism and duotheism Daostic kind of relationship. They also have opposite personalities.
• The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode "The Genesis Tub" has Bart of all characters as this, with Lisa as the titular world's Crystal Dragon Jesus. They originally saw Bart as "The Devil"; imagine their shock when Lisa told her creations Bart was actually her brother.

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