Basic Trope: The higher power(s) who created the universe are conspicuously absent, sometimes even in situations where His/Her/Their intervention would seem to be most urgently needed.
- Straight: The Divine Ones are too lazy to help with anything, even when they're needed.
- Exaggerated: The Divine Ones sleep through The End of the World as We Know It
- Downplayed: The Divine Ones step in if the threat is to the universe as a whole.
- Justified:
- The Divine Ones live by self-imposed rules against meddling in the mortal realm any more than what is absolutely necessary.
- The Divine Ones don't want to babysit their creations.
- The Divine Ones personally involving themselves would result in Mutually Assured Destruction. So they act through proxies like in the Cold War.
- The Divine Ones grew too powerful from millennia of worship. Any direct creation or destruction would include entire continents and any creation far enough away to send help would take millennia to actually show up.
- The Divine Ones are no more
- Inverted: The Divine Ones are so effective at battling evil that the mortal heroes sit back and watch.
- Subverted:
- They might seem lazy at first, but do something helpful later on.
- The gods do nothing to stop Emperor Evulz...for one episode. In Episode 2, Faye strikes him with a Bolt of Divine Retribution. Roll credits!
- Double Subverted: This something is delivering a Holy Hand Grenade. It's still up to the mortals to actually use it.
- Parodied: The Divine Ones are sitting on couches and watch the Puny Humans fight from the sidelines, with popcorn.
- Zig Zagged: In one battle the Divine Ones help, but the next they don't, the following one they're more advisors then helpers but in the fourth they do everything.....
- Averted:
- The gods get off their divine butts and do something helpful.
- The gods of the setting are helping out, only on cosmic levels of being, like revitalizing dying or ravaged dimensions, infusing them with new matter and energy, or fending off Eldritch Abominations before they can threaten earth.
- Enforced: How to Stop the Deus ex Machina
- Lampshaded: "Why don't the gods ever help us when we need their help!?"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: The Genre Savvy Big Bad launches his Evil Plan on the presumption that the Divine Ones will not interfere.
- Defied: A villain that believes the Divine Ones will not stop him is struck by a Bolt of Divine Retribution.
- Discussed: "Are you sure we won't get in trouble for us?" "Of course I am, the Divine Ones may be good but they're also lazy."
- Conversed: "Here comes the handwave."
- Deconstructed: The inactivity of the Divine Ones results in the worshipers gradually decreasing in number until, eventually, they are forgotten, and they start starving.
- Reconstructed: The Divine Ones are inactive, but the Paladins, White Mages, Church Militants, and enlightenment superheroes, who are empowered by them are not.
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