Misused: God Is Evil

• However, this needs to be noted that it is a Subverted Trope

1. Berserk: In a semi-decanonized chapter, which was removed for reasons of revealing too much, God was revealed to be behind everything that happens in Berserk's Crapsack World, and it was created out of humanity's desire for there to be an ultimate reason to blame for human suffering; which resulted in the creation of the Idea of Evil, a grimdark version of Plato's Theory of Forms, whose purpose in life was to literally be responsible for everybody suffering so much. And it's very good at it, having conspired to drive Griffith into his ascension as the fifth Godhand, Femto, through the workings of Causality, which leads to the series theme of Fighting Fate. It can be seen as an inversion though; in this case, evil is God.
2. God in Cat Soup is pretty much only concerned about eating, even fucking up with time and space to do so.
3. Go Nagai did this all the time in his works.
   1. The God of Demon Lord Dante was an evil space being who demanded that the humans living on Earth worship him. When they didn't, he torched their cities, inadvertently turning the entire human race into demonic beings by having God's energy merge them with various objects (the main character merges with a jet plane and dinosaurs to turn into a giant demon), and split himself up into pieces and inserted himself into apes, becoming modern man as a result. He further becomes even more of a bastard when it is revealed at the end that the entire war between God and demons was done on purpose just because it was entertaining to him.
   2. Devilman implies that God exterminated and sealed away the demons because he disapproved of the way his first shot at creating life turned out. And he's basically an Eldritch Abomination that turns humans into pillars of salt from merely looking upon him. Interestingly enough, however, in the original manga and the original manga alone, God wasn't really portrayed as evil in the Devilman Universe (or at least a completely and utterly irredeemable asshole yet). He originally created the world, left for a while, then found the Demons, who were not part of his plans, and considered them abominations. And in all brutal fairness, it's very easy to see why he hated them, even if he's in the wrong for hating them just because it wasn't part of the plan, but seemed content to just let the tides of fate roll out once they began to free their icy prison. In what could have been seen as a massive Pet the Dog and even Hope Spot for humanity in such a Crapsack World, God personally intervened in the story by saving the human race from a nuclear holocaust launched by a Demon possessing the president of Russia, who had launched Russia's entire nuclear payload in an attempt to destroy all of humanity, albeit at the cost of turning every last human in Russia (or the USSR in the original manga) into salt with his mere presence. He may not have been friendly, but at least it might have seemed like he actually wanted the human race to win and survive the conflict against the Demons. But then...
   3. In AMON: Apocalypse of Devilman, it's revealed that God has put the entire world into a time loop so all humans and demons live and die for nothing over and over, just to make Satan suffer the loss of his beloved repeatedly for all eternity. Just in case we weren't already aware of how much of a dick he is. This also makes it likely his aforementioned Pet the Dog for humanity was likely only done to prolong the end of the world as Satan had yet to lose his beloved at this point, thus prolonging his suffering.
4. Digimon:
   1. Another Digimon god is Yggdrasil, a master computer that, in some incarnations of the Digital World, created the world and controls it. In every media it appeared it, whether it is the X-Evolution movie or the Digimon Data Squad anime, it always ends up trying to destroy its own creation (and in the case of Data Squad, the human world as well). He has a highly variable morality though-in X-Evolution, he's an enigmatic terror who has motives no one knows, in Digimon Data Squad he's an Anti-Villain with a easily justifiable hatred of humanity, in NEXT, he's a victim of Demonic Possession, and in Digimon Adventure tri. he just plans on destroying humanity for no reason.
5. In One-Punch Man, God gives monsters and people his power to destroy humanity, and free him from his dimensional prison, and has no concerns with taking those powers back, along with the lives of those he granted power to, to ensure that they cannot reveal his presence.
6. A major plot point in episode 9 of Seven Mortal Sins revealed that God plans on purging both Earth and Hell and banished Lucifer after she protested against it.
7. The last episode of You Are Being Summoned, Azazel seems to indicate that in the universe of that series, the God of the Bible rules, and he is clearly depicted as every bit as loathsome as atheists usually contend that he is — vengeful and petty, with unreasonable standards and demands on others. He also likes to subject people to really, really bad dirty jokes, but since he surrounds himself with irredeemable toadies who pretend that his jokes are funny, he isn't aware that they aren't.
8. In Preacher (also by Ennis), God is shown to be a pathetic creature who has a pathological need to be loved, and is willing to destroy anyone who turns their back on Him. As it turns out, He isn't even omnipotent; it's His throne that gives Him limitless power, and in the final issue He's tricked into leaving it and ends up reaped by His own Grim Reaper, who as it turns out Was Once a Man whom God had massively screwed over in his mortal life so that he'd replace the current Angel of Death.
   "I am a Loving God, Tulip... But don't push it."
   1. What started the plot in the first place? God created a creature as powerful as Himself... so He could be loved by it. He actually gets a kick out of people worshipping Him despite the craptastic nature of the world, and actively makes it worse for that reason.
9. The Lucifer (2016)/Chilling Adventures of Sabrina series "Morningstar Family Values" features a plot point where Lucifer reveals to Chloe that his mother drowned the last generation of grandchildren; with Chloe still assuming Lucifer's talk of being the Devil is a weird delusion, she interprets his words as him being part of a cult and contemplates trying to find a way to identify said cult and prosecute Lucifer's parents. When she finally receives evidence of Lucifer's true nature, Chloe is left lost about how to feel about the idea that she was contemplating trying to prosecute God Himself, but further research leads her to the conclusion that Lucifer's father has done such a bad job that He shouldn't be responsible for a lemonade stand, much less all of existence.
   1. While Trixie is only a child and potentially ignorant of the scale of what she's saying, at one point she is faced with being sacrificed by a cult if she doesn't reject Lucifer and Sabrina and proclaim her love for God, but Trixie counters that she won't say she loves God after he was "mean" to Lucifer and Amenadiel.
10. Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans: Bellroc, Keeper of the Flame, is revealed to be this trope in the movie, being the leader of the Arcane Order^note which is equivalent with the Holy Trinity in the Bible, with Bellroc representing God the Father who created the universe alongside Skrael and Nari, with the Titans as their handmaidens. Her goal is to unite the Fire Titan with the Heartstone to annihilate the universe, which would kill everything and everyone in existence, and then rebirth the world as a Lethal Lava Land.
11. The Devil's Carnival implies and The Devil's Carnival: Alleluia! outright depicts their version of God as being petty, lustful, and wrathful, and with Heaven as his seemingly-cheerful personal dictatorship. He even sings about causing one of the worst dust storms in U.S. history. The Devil and his Carnival are only little better...maybe.
12. The Architect in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions: Not only is he named "The Architect" (the name that Freemasons use for God), he sits in a throne, watching everything that happens in his realm and is an old man with a white beard and a deep voice. Clearly an allusion. He's also incapable of empathy (he creates the program Oracle for that) and feels no love at all for the humans. His sole purpose is to facilitate the proper functioning of the Matrix by manipulating the Resistance indirectly. He might not be the creator of the humans or the universe outside the Matrix, but is a very similar concept of God that certain religions have like the Demiurge in Gnosticism or the role of Brahma in Buddhism (Buddhist and Gnostic themes are prevalent in the films).
13. In the 2010 film, Legion, God comes to the conclusion that the human race is no longer worthy of Him, and decides to end their existence. Archangel Michael fights the angelic army, and tells Archangel Gabriel that he (Michael) did what God needed, not what God wanted, thus giving humanity another chance. The weird thing about that is that the baby the pregnant woman is carrying is implied (if not outright stated) to be the second coming of Christ. Who is God. Who is trying to end the world. By stopping himself from being born and saving the world...
14. The Voorman Problem: Voorman, a crazed prison inmate interviewed by psychiatrist Dr. Williams, turns out to actually be God. He tells Williams that wars amuse him. At the end he switches places with Williams, leaving to have sex with Williams's wife while Williams is locked in prison. Oh, and he literally wipes Belgium off the map.
15. On the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica and Caprica, the One God not only allows its worshipers to go on genocidal rampages, but it actually appears to take actions to prompt individuals to carry out actions that will ensure the perpetual cycle of human/Cylon conflict. The Messenger beings that supposedly represent it appear to specific people to make sure certain things happen. Most notably, one of the Messengers guides Zoe Graystone in creating the software needed to create artificial intelligence, which will later make the Cylons of the Twelve Colonies sentient.
16. Supernatural:
    1. God is a cruel, capricious being who is subjecting the protagonists (not to mention the rest of the world) to pain, horror and bad writing for his own sadistic entertainment. He said so himself.
    2. Due to the Season 6 finale, Castiel also falls into this category, since a combination of well-intentioned extremism and phenomenal cosmic power seems to have made him more than a little prideful/nuts. Though in season 7 it turned out that this was at least partly due to The Corruption, and by the time he truly goes off the deep end he's fallen victim to a full-blown Demonic Possession.
    3. The season 10 finale introduces the Darkness, "a horribly destructive amoral force" that existed before God and would later act as The Corruption on Lucifer himself, possibly reducing the blame on God as it means evil was not his creation. Although, Death also reveals that, after God and the angels defeated the Darkness, it was God who sealed it with the Mark of Cain and put the Mark on Lucifer, making him complicit in Lucifer's fall.
    4. The Season 14 finale finally confirms all the above allegations — God treats reality as only existing for his entertainment, with the Winchesters' suffering in particular being his "favorite show". When they refuse to keep playing along, he decides to murder his own grandson Jack and tear open Hell.
    5. Throughout season 15, Chuck keeps looking for ways to force the Winchesters to take part in his plotline and truly starts to give in to pure evil, from toying with Becky and her family before snapping them out of existence, murdering everybody at a casino, terrorizing people into serving him, torturing Sam until he gives up all hope, and ultimately going on an omnicidal rampage to destroy the entire multiverse. It gets so bad that Billie, the new Death, decides to break her own rules on raising the dead, and decides to form an alliance with the Shadow allowing Jack to come back to life, so she can give him instructions to become strong enough to Kill God.
17. God in Fireaxe's four hour epic "Food for the Gods" depicts how his influence on the world creates numerous wars and atrocities which culminates with Satan leading the demons of hell (and humans who were condemned there) to storming and destroying heaven. There Satan puts it best when Jesus proclaims how he suffered for Humanity's sins.
    You may have suffered for the sins of man, but I have suffered for the sins of God.
18. In "Prayer," Religion Rant Song by Disturbed, God makes humans suffer for no good reason.
    Another nightmare about to come true
    Will manifest tomorrow
    Another love that I've taken from you
    Lost in time, on the edge of suffering
    Another taste of the evil I breed
    Will level you completely
    Bring to life everything that you fear
    Live in the dark, and the world is threatening
19. Nitheful:
    1. "Sacramentum ov Filicide" portrays God as a Complete Monster responsible for the ills of man so He can receive their unyielding supplication and worship as their supposed "savior" while doing nothing to save his son Jesus from his crucifixion just to satisfy His sadistic pleasure.
    2. Their second full-length album The Creation ov God, which the aforementioned track comes from, is a Concept Album dedicated to this trope, with each and every song based on atrocities that God committed Himself or ordered His followers to carry out in His name as depicted in the Bible.
20. Much of Gary Numan's musical catalogue from the album "Sacrifice" onward depicts God as cruel and delighting in humanity's suffering.
21. The Black Dahlia Murder's song "Their Beloved Absentee" off of Everblack portrays God as a twisted and perverted voyeur who takes fiendish amusement in silently watching mankind turn on and destroy themselves.
22. Scion: The PCs are the half-human offspring of various deities from (mostly) abandoned mythologies. While their divine parents have an aspect of all-too-human dickery about them (the game is quite faithful to how mythology originally presented them), only a couple of them are outright evil. The Abrahamic deity is not explicitly present, but the sole avatar of one of the evil Titanic Primordial Forces is a shining bearded guy who wants everything in existence to sacrifice their free will and be absolutely devoted to him. Scion Companion presents, as a possible antagonist, a group of people who are manipulating Fate to force all gods into an Abrahamic mold. It's heavily suggested that if they pulled it off, it would fit this trope.
23. It's kind of hard to deny that The Brick Testament has this angle going for it; it was pretty much intended as a way of pointing out the questionable points of the Bible. The Book of Revelation in particular is stuffed to the gills with this trope, right down to sardonic titles and cutting commentary by the LEGO minifigures suffering the whole time.
24. Oglaf: "God is on their side. But I've been reading their holy book, and I think that God may be a psycho. (SFW)
25. Another creepypasta called "In Heaven" features a reverend dying and meeting God... well, in Heaven. God turns out to be a Faux Affably Evil egotist, who created humans just to worship Him, going so far as to masquerade as every other deity humanity ever worshipped. He also turns anybody who enters Heaven (which, in this story, is everybody) into mindless slaves, incapable of independent thought. He then does this to the aforementioned reverend.
26. Proven in The Nostalgia Critic's Old vs. New of The Ten Commandments (1956) vs. The Prince of Egypt, where he smites the titular character for thinking he's kind and loving.
    God: You were wrong. I'm not a loving God, I'm a vengeful God. Your ass is grass.
27. The Salvation War uses this as a fundamental premise. Yahweh, the entity that presented himself as the Christian god (and apparently Allah for the Islamic faith as well) is actually an immature douchebag who became drunk on the power he held over humanity until he reached the point where he became convinced of his own lie. He eventually became fed up with those parts of humanity that questioned him, and closed the gates of Heaven to mankind sometime around 1000 A.D., thereby condemning all of humanity to Hell, even the faithful. The story gets kicked off when he decides that isn't enough, and gives Satan free rein to wipe out mankind forever so Yahweh could go to a different dimension to find some other species that might be more obedient. However, by the time this happened, humanity had become very technologically advanced, while Heaven and Hell were still at the Bronze Age. You can predict what a pissed-off humanity does next.
    1. Even the angels are pissed off at him! The Archangel Michael is running The Plan which basically saves the heavenly host while pointing an army of absolutely enraged humans at Yahweh, and eventually kills him himself, having killed off all of Yahweh's powerful supporters by stealth or by human. Except Jesus, really called Elhmas, who is mostly presented as a stoned out of his brains idiot, until it is revealed he faked his own death and is keeping an eye on Michael to prevent him from turning into another Yahweh.
    2. Michael's plot was apparently not the only one either.
28. God in {{Starpocalypse is a deranged, perverted monster who gets sexually aroused by killing humans, making humans kill humans, watching humans have sex, and caused various social problems imposing arbitrary and insane rules on early humans for fun. It had a great time during the Inquisition.
29. Unicron from Transformers: Prime also counts. As Optimus puts it he is, metaphorically speaking, the parent of humanity and all life on Earth. He agrees with Optimus on this, and then Unicron declares all life he created as parasites unworthy of living
30. This appears to be the case in the Joan of Arc segment of The Simpsons episode "Tales from the Public Domain."
    God: I told this maiden to lead the French to victory.
    English Soldier (Willie): Wait a minute, you two-timing spot of light. You told me to lead the English to victory!
    Joan (Lisa): *gasp* Is that true, Lord?
    God: Well, I never thought the two of you would be in the same room, actually. This is a little embarrassing. Goodbye now.
31. The Canadian adult animated series Tripping the Rift actually features a few appearances by God and the Devil. Though the latter is definitely evil, the former is kind of a dick. He's depicted as wagering on the main character's soul with the Devil because he's bored and unleashing a plague of locusts on a planet because they refused to worship him (thinking he's a con artist like the ones they had dealt with earlier in the episode). However, the most blatant example of the trope is in the episode where Chode and Gus travel back to the beginning of time. Their ship accidentally collides with God and kills Him. But when they return to their own time, they discover that they've actually made things BETTER. Without God, there's no concept of good and evil, and everyone is basically decent towards each other; there's no crime or war or sexual repression. Everything is going pretty well...until Chode and Gus let the cat out of the bag and introduce the concept of sin to the universe, sending it into chaos. They travel back in time to set things right and get killed themselves, and God walks away laughing at their deaths.
32. In the "World's End" storyline in The Sandman (1989), one of the nested stories is a take on Prez: First Teenage President. In this version when Prez Rickard dies, Death takes him to meet the Prince of the World (although she says he didn't create the world, he just "runs the local franchise"). Prez is horrified to discover this is Boss Smiley, the corrupt politician he's been fighting against his whole career. Instead of taking his place at Smiley's right hand, he goes off to find other Americas with Morpheus.
33. Harlan Ellison, who was an atheist, addressed this in a few of his short stories:
    1. In "Hitler Painted Roses," God, (or, at least the Godhead that appears) is concerned only with maintaining the status quo of Heaven, and thus refuses to let a wrongly damned soul free herself from Hell.
    2. "The Death Bird" portrays the "Satan" character as a misunderstood savior and "God" as a malevolent alien bent on control. The main character, a reincarnation of Adam, is revived and sent to defeat "God" in order to bring Earth to an end and achieve rest for himself and humanity.
34. In The Gospel According To Jesus Christ by José Saramago, God is implied to be just one god of many and he created Jesus basically out of greed, as a tool to make all people in the world worship him, not just Jews. Jesus is actually troubled by this because he thinks it will bring untold suffering to mankind but goes along because he thinks he has no choice. He then tries to stop God's plan... by making the Romans crucify him. Only to realize, horrified, that this was part of God's plan all along.
35. Star Maker paints a portrait of God — or, as he's referred to in the book, the "Star Maker" — who creates universes more out of a sense of aesthetics than anything else. Once he's done with one, he'll discard it and move on to another (no Heaven here, folks). The book gives fleeting descriptions of the final, perfect universe that will perfectly fulfill the Star Maker; even (or especially) in this universe, there will be beings who exist in a perfect state of eternal suffering and horror, without which the universe as a whole could not be perfect. Ugh.
36. In Dragon Quest IX, it turns out The Almighty is kind of a royal prick who tried to destroy humanity just 'cuz. He's also been dead for a while, and it's implied that the grotto Bonus Bosses you fight are fragments of his soul. Thankfully his daughter's pretty cool.
37. In Duel Savior Destiny God set up a system where the forces of Ruin would invade every thousand years and require the rise of the Messiah to stop them without any regard to the massive potential casualties. It's actually worse than this: If anything, God is directly responsible for the forces of Ruin, though he doesn't lead them. He is, in fact, trying to destroy the universe and remake it to something he can understand better. He's done it hundreds of times before.
38. Final Fantasy:
    1. The Creator in Final Fantasy IV: The After Years turns out to be an Evilutionary Biologist who doesn't give a damn about his creations beyond their role as planetary experiments. Vaguely hinted to be the same as the creator from Final Fantasy XIII, although, since he doesn't appear in person there, it isn't very clear in the latter how much was God being evil and how much was God not programming his biological crystal robots very well.
    2. Final Fantasy X had the church of Yevon, who were blinded by lies and persecuted with a giant, indestructible Space Whale called Sin that was capable of leveling cities over the course of a thousand years. Yevon turns out to not be a benevolent god, but a deranged summoner who refused to die and used the souls of the last survivors of his civilization to summon a recreation of their city for them to live in forever - the same "dream Zanarkand" that Tidus and Jecht came from - via an Assimilation Plot. Sin was actually a hull for Yevon's spirit, programmed to demolish any civilization that became advanced enough to potentially disrupt the "dream" Zanarkand. Still, the true purpose of the church of Yevon (as founded by his daughter) was to appease him without letting him destroy the rest of the world for revenge. Suffice to say, this knowledge never made it past the church's leaders... until a certain Badass Longcoat who learned the truth refused to stay dead.
    3. In Final Fantasy XVI, Ultima is revealed to be the God responsible for creating humanity and giving life to Valisthea, and is also a narcissistic Hypocrite who condemns them for developing free will and repeating the mistakes that their own kind made, conveniently forgetting that they took their creations for granted and didn't bother to give them any guidance on their plans. Which was just as well, since Ultima never planned on sharing the world with humanity to begin with, and always planned to dispose of them once they'd outlived their usefulness.
    4. God is the Big Bad in The Final Fantasy Legend, having created Ashura and his four fiends as entertainment for himself. And he's a little Amish man (at least before the battle starts). The most popular way the final confrontation goes down? The heroes murder God with a chainsaw.
39. Shin Megami Tensei uses this trope faithfully; YHVH is a complete and utter megalomaniac who demands full respect and worship from man, and if they don't provide such, His wrath follows quickly. In many games, the Law path that YHVH patrons results in a variant of the World of Silence, where all creation does nothing except ceaselessly chant prayers to Him for all eternity. Lucifer is more on our side, but he's still willing to do some horrible things to "help" us. Atlus has stated that this all stems from something terribly wrong at the very core of reality. They've also claimed that they're moving away from this trope to avoid offending heavily-Christian countries now that they have a wider audience. By "move away", they apparently mean "be a touch more subtle about it".
    1. By the end of Shin Megami Tensei II, everyone wants God dead, from Lucifer to the angel Gabriel. The player takes care of this.
    2. The boss theme of Nocturne has the demons praying to Him for help. Lucifer also implies that God has been destroying and recreating the world multiple times over, with each new iteration meaning the deaths of everyone in the old world that is replaced, and it's implied the events of Shin Megami Tensei II didn't take and the protagonist got a Fate Worse than Death for his part in it.
    3. Although God Himself doesn't appear in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, those acting in His name are no better than He ever was (and while it's hinted they may not be acting on His orders, that's never confirmed). 'Sides, angels don't so much as breathe if they don't get the go-ahead to do so from their master. In addition, the Demiurge sidequest very heavily implies the Demiurge is, in fact, YHVH, and that the Demiurge fella is still very much this. While it's implied he becomes somewhat more reasonable after you defeat him and allow Metatron (actually another piece of YHVH) to merge with him, he's still more or less an Ax-Crazy Knight Templar who has you take him to Mem Aleph so he can participate in killing her in the Law Path and warns you very severely there will be consequences for not choosing his way in the other paths. He's also flat-out mentioned to have forgotten his love for humans and trampled the Goddess-worshipping world, implying he's still an attention-hungry bastard. The name is a bit of a giveaway. Then Strange Journey Redux came out and in the New endings it turns out the Three Wise Men are in fact a depowered God (Shekinah). What do they want to do, you ask? to create the World of Law... By replacing the old one and ANNIHILATING most humans and strip from the few remaining their free will by forcing them to endlessly worship Her. Fortunately, the main character wrecks them before they can do any of its plans in all new endings (Yes, even in New Law) and takes their Cosmic Egg (Cosmic Fruit), their power source, stopping Her from coming back and using it to guarantee that the Earth won't be consumed by the Schwarzwelt. Doomguy would be proud of the MC .
    4. The original release of Devil Survivor implies that God is a bit less evil, given His actions on the behalf of humanity this go-round. The Updated Re-release of Devil Survivor, however, again throws doubt upon God's motivations, by revealing he deliberately set up the Abel And Cain scenario in order to create the first martyr and the first murderer and will treat the player much more harshly if they go down the Chaos path. While God is certainly understandable in His fear of the Overlord and his desire to get rid of them, His methods of doing so is to threaten the people in the city into hunting you, in order to prey off of your empathy as they beg you to let them kill you so they can be spared. When that fails, he sends Metatron to flatten the city in its entirety, and when THAT fails, he's all too willing to destroy the planet all together. Though ultimately this trope is zigzagged since as cruel God can be in the game; he only becomes so if the player goes down the path of Chaos, aka the path where you assist the demons who are also behind much of the game's villainy. If you stick with the Law path God is happy to send assistance your way. Also unlike other SMT games, even if you go down the Neutral path God and his servants are wary of you but still helpful, making this more "God is Evil if you really tick him off".
    5. Shin Megami Tensei IV has the DLC episode "Ancient One of the Sun" which pits the protagonist against the Ancient of Days, one of God's Names. The Ancient of Days has arrived to kill off all the inhabitants of Blasted Tokyo, effectively committing genocide so that "God's Chosen" can inherit the Earth. Without the DLC episodes it is actually ambiguous about if God is evil or not, at least as far as Normal Tokyo is concerned and God's plan got derailed completely at Infernal Tokyo due to Kenji killing off the angels before God's Wrath could be unleashed.
    6. Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse has YHVH as the final antagonist that must be beaten in the Bonds and Massacre route to stop him from oppressing humanity. God Is Evil is a firm belief among the Divine Powers, who seek to create their own universe that will be free from YHVH's machinations. Krishna explains that Both Order and Chaos are Dangerous because of YHVH intentionally setting up the universe as a stage for a faked Forever War, but points out that order and chaos by themselves are not bad things.
       • Note should be added that this is also a case of Not Quite the Almighty, as explained on that page's example
40. This is touched upon in The World Ends with You, as whether or not the Composer of The Game is simply just giving a reasonable chance to everyone for their lives again or is rather a complete Jerkass sadist who likes pitting people against each other with the risk of losing their existence. At any rate, it's a rare case where the Jesus-figure is undeniably an asshole.
41. Xenoblade Chronicles 1 has the Big Bad Zanza, the God of Bionis; a complete and utter bastard who, after destroying the entire universe, has led the world he created to an apocalypse multiple times so that his creations, which he relies on to exist, don't leave the world and expand to the stars.
42. Star Ocean: Till the End of Time has Our Heroes daring to enter the Time Gate into the 4th dimension, to thwart God's plans to eradicate the Milky Way and establish independence. In the climax, it turns out that the fourth dimension is full of super-advanced apathetic humans, who created our universe as a combination of reality TV and role-playing games (Earth's mythical heroes were player characters). "God" is a corporate suit who's reformatting parts of the program, seeing humanity's attempts to practice "symbology" (programming code) as some kind of bug in the system. And what truly makes this "god" evil is that when he finds out that humans have been practicing Symbology, rather than painlessly deleting them, he sends the "angelic" hordes to wipe out humanity. Maybe he thought it would boost the ratings...
    • This may be more accurately classified as Abusive Precursors
43. In the Rance universe, the creator god is a giant whale who created all of existence just to watch people fight and kill each other in wars. So Humans Are Bastards because it is Inherent in the System. And entertaining, apparently. At the end of the series, said creator decides to incarnate himself as a mortal being (as one of Rance's children, no less) just to experience things from a new perspective, and winds up learning empathy and how to care about things other than slaughter and despair. As a result, he abolishes the system of constant warfare and decides to give peace a chance instead.

Technically correct by the current definition but not the Abrahamic God or equivalent

1. G.O.D.: Heed the Call to Awaken: The humans victorious against the aliens and their leader Ra Mu are faced with a being, or rather presence, calling itself God, and claiming to have been around at the beginning of the universe, when it finally reveals itself and makes its move. God itself (which is a mere conciousness) refers to the title of the game, all of you having gone through a process of 'growth or devolution'. It is the plan of such an entity, to obtain a perfectly honed body at long last, and this body will be chosen from among your party. Your party is then "offered" to be spared the destruction of the present world, and will be the only ones conferred such a privilige.
2. It's revealed in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn that the setting's Top Goddess, Ashera, is a hypocritical Holier Than Thou Knight Templar who intends to destroy humanity in order to put an end to war (while ironically allowing the real villains behind said war to live with her blessing). She does, however, have a Freudian Excuse: aghast at accidentally destroying the world with a Great Flood millennia ago, she removed all her emotions and placed them in a separate being, leaving herself impossibly cold and uncaring. The game's Distant Finale reveals that she and the being composed of her emotions (who served as the Big Good of the game) will eventually reunite into a pure good goddess.
3. The RPG H-Game "Monster Girl 1,000" has True Goddess Eris as this, through and through as her entire plan is to remake the world by cleansing it completely of all humans and monster girl-kind. The intro and a later event specifically showcases just how disgustingly-rotten she is when she declares this to her subordinates in a meeting they attend.
   Eris: Humanity will be wiped. Every human, every monster girl, every demon girl. I'll take their power for myself.
4. The cause of all the horror and dangers you face in Hollow Knight? The Radience, the goddess who created bugkind. The plague, the monsters you fight, and every other threat in the game were created by her out of spite after mortals stopped worshipping her. Yes, she’s trying to destroy her own world because it’s not paying attention to her.
5. Spiritual successor Dark Souls also features this to a lesser extent in the form of Gwyn, whose hubris and pride lead him to condemn Humanity to the Undead Curse in order to extend his Age of Fire. He also commands his clerics to slay all the Undead as he fears the Dark Soul humans possess.
6. O'ne the Creator in The Great Power of Chninkel. The Almighty Creator is willing to annihilate an entire planet and its life but not willing to just kill the three warring immortals Itself. O'ne actually does kill almost all life (save a few tawals living underground) by raining fire on the planet's surface. The reason? The heretic king N'om called It out on Its dickery and how everything was a conspiracy to make everyone worship It for all eternity. Though at the very least he kept his promise not to destroy Darr.
7. Red Sonja - Wrath of the Gods depicts Odin from Norse Mythology at its most villainous, being a genocidal tyrant out to exterminate a pacifist tribe out of pure racism and intends to reassert Norse Pantheon dominance over Hyboria once more. Loki serves him as The Dragon and they were both responsible for slaughtering Thor's human family after hearing of a prophecy that he would one day dethrone him. And as if that wasn't bad enough, he is also a Dirty Old Man that tries to claim Sonja as his own.
8. Many of the various gods in Kurohime and one of its central themes. When we finally meet the creator of man (not the Big Bad Yashahime by the way, just some goddess lazing around), she abandons her creations outright to kill the titular heroine. She fails of course, which brings up ANOTHER of the manga's central themes.
9. Kubo and the Two Strings: While he isn't stated to have created the universe, Raiden the Moon King is nonetheless the ruler of Heaven and is characterized as a cold, human-hating totalitarian. Angry that his daughter married a human, he tries to take their son, Kubo, to live with him in Heaven (portrayed here as cold and uncaring, especially towards humans), which requires him to tear out Kubo's eyes to make him blind to humanity. At one point, Raiden actually refers to Earth as "hell". He even looks like an Elderly Immortal, albeit without a beard. At the film's end, Raiden is magically transformed into a human, loses his memory, and is convinced by everyone else that he has always been good.
10. Downplayed in the Dream SMP:
    1. DreamXD is the Top God (as far as we know) of the DSMP universe and draws his power from death, so he actively encourages the wars and deaths and all-round shitty conditions on the server so as to stay powerful. For example, as the spin-off series Tales From the SMP reveals, he grants time-travelling powers to certain people, but It Sucks to Be the Chosen One as their memory deteriorates the more their powers activate (they can't control to when and where they travel) until they undergo Loss of Identity, then XD has them killed after that point. He does Pet the Dog on occasion, making him a bit of a downplayed example, but not by much.
    2. It's also been stated that there are other Physical Gods on the server, with most of them being relatively more benevolent as far as our knowledge goes, but they are either minor characters at best (Mumza, Drista, possibly MotherInnit if we take her Word of Saint Paul for it^# All three of them are either played by server guests or only make cameo appearances), or are nowhere near as powerful as XD and thus are unable to challenge him (Foolish).
11. Part of the backstory of Imajica is that ages ago, the one, singular male god named "Hapexamendios" defeated all the various separate minor female goddesses and became the God of all realms. Hapexamendios has been trying to bring about "The Reconciliation" which will reconnect Earth to the other four "Dominions" which will then allow him to destroy them all.
12. The Confessions (Saint Augustine) makes the case that as contradictory as it is to call the source of goodness evil, the heavenly father in The Aeneid is certainly a villain. After all, how could Jupiter be The Omnipotent judge of the universe and commit adultery with every woman in Greece? Augustine finds it contradictory to call such a traitorous husband and neglectful father divine and believes that this aspect of Classical Mythology is a lie meant to excuse the Lust and Parental Abandonment of the Greco-Roman elite.

1. Although this will come as a surprise to no one, behold! The Tetris God!
2. The Last Resurrection features Jesus as the Big Bad and God as Greater-Scope Villain.
3. In Scribblenauts, you can turn God evil. You can also give him a shotgun and a skateboard and have him fight Cthulhu.
4. The DS Tactical RPG Luminous Arc has this, as well as a Corrupt Church. Oddly enough, they actually oppose each other in the end.
5. Morganna from .hack. She manifests as a godlike being; a disembodied voice and psychic presence.
6. Angel Sanctuary. Technically a spoiler, but between the state of Heaven and the Sorting Algorithm of Evil, it's pretty obvious.
7. The premise of the post-Rapture graphic novel Therefore, Repent!.
8. With This Ring: Paul already had a poor view of the Abrahamic God from his original life in our reality (where it's heavily implied He didn't even exist since Paul didn't originally have a soul), and it doesn't improve one bit once he ends up in the DC-verse where all religions are true. While The Presence never appears "in person", Christianity does NOT come off good in the series, and only gets worse when he's drawn into some of the angels trying to pull off a coup in Heaven.
9. Calvin delights in imagining God this way, most notably in this◊ strip.
10. Locus: Meittron was driven to it. Nor is Sammael an Unreliable Narrator, as Word of God confirms his story.
11. Oglaf proves the point. (SFW page on site where most pages are NSFW.)
12. Wondermark discusses maltheism, slightly tongue-in-cheek, in a series of strips starting here.
13. The Archangel from The Fear Mythos. He is the afterlife. The whole damn thing.
14. The Sea Mother from The Wanderer's Library Or maybe she's just insane from feeling us moving through her "skin".
15. In El Conquistador, there are many evil gods. Huitzilopotchli is maybe the more omnipresent god of sacrifices in the Aztec empire, but also Jehová, Jesus and all his family and prophets are depicted this way.
16. In Keeper of the Swords, the local Crystal Dragon Jesus, called "The Saviour", is evil. Also, he is depicted very similar to the actual Jesus. Creepy.

Rage Against the Heavens (38)

1. The Northern Church in Wise Phuul believes in a malign monotheistic Creator God. They conclude that God must be fought at every opportunity.
2. Part One of Till We Have Faces is a complaint against all the gods for meddling in mortal affairs while remaining hidden from clear sight. Part Two begins with the narrator, now on her deathbed, admitting her complaint was a perjury. The gods could never face a woman who refused to truly see herself, to see that she would rather see her father figure, her love, and her sister alone, hated, or dead than happy if it meant them belonging to a god that was not her.
3. Left Behind: This is the perceived viewpoint of Jesus and God within The Other Light faction in Kingdom Come, who believes that God Is Evil because He won't let "naturals" in the Snake Person Kingdom live past 100 years of age as unbelievers, and end up passing their teachings to the next generation of converts so that the generations that does get to confront God and Jesus at the end of the Millennium will be "assured victory" when Satan is released. Unfortunately for them, it didn't go as they hoped.
4. A variation occurs in Lands of Ice and Mice. The Manupataq religion believes that Jesus Christ is actually the bringer of plagues. They do actually use crosses to mark villages that are under quarantine.
5. In Legend of the Galactic Heroes, while he never exhibited overt religiosity, Oskar von Reuenthal mused during the occasion where he was framed for the second time that if a Creator exists, He must be a malicious one.
6. Eppy Thatcher from Grendel subscribes to this trope, and has "God hates me" as his Catchphrase. Then again, this is a guy who's so messed up that he believes he killed God at the end of his run as Grendel.
7. In the comic book Hellblazer (which Ennis did a lot of writing for), The First of the Fallen (a leader of Hell) tells John Constantine that God is completely insane. John also works out that The First is actually God's conscience, removed at the dawn of creation because he kept nagging at Him. God himself never appears, but from what little is seen of His work through the Angels doesnt exactly paint Him in the best light. For example, the Archangel Michael himself assisted in the creation of Jesus by raping Mary, and commited genocide against the first-born of Egypt, all on God's orders. You can probably tell that Ennis isnt crazy about Christianity.
8. Ironically, the Thor villain Gorr the God-Butcher both believes this, being a Hollywood Atheist with a Trauma Conga Line background, and is this, as he's empowered by an uber-divine god-killing weapon - created by an actual evil God - that he uses to take Rage Against the Heavens to the level of hunting down, torturing and murdering every god he can find.
9. Garth Ennis' The Punisher: "Sometimes I'd like to get my hands on God."
10. Windfall and Twister have something of a heart to heart in an issue of Suicide Squad.
    Windfall: Excuse me — you're a nun, right?
    Twister: Oh yes. Sister Mary Ignatius. They used to call me Twister. And you're Windfall. We're going to do God's work together.
    Windfall: Do you mind if I ask you a question about God, Sister?
    Twister: Of course not, child!
    Windfall: Why — why does God hate me?
    Twister: Oh, Windfall! God doesn't hate just you! God hates everybody.
    Windfall: ... What?!
    Twister: Well, look at me! Look at you! Look at the state of the world! Do you see the loving hand of a kindly God or somebody's idea of a sick joke? Don't take it personally.
11. The Palaververse: When talking about Saddle Arabian religion, they have gone God Is Evil, due to the horrific nature of the wildlife that encompasses their land:
    the Saddle Arabians long ago looked at the hostile hellscape they lived in, and couldn’t help but wonder how any thinking being could come to any other conclusion than that there is a Creator, and it hates its Creation with a savage and tyrannical hatred. Nothing of a benevolent disposition could have created or permitted wind scorpions or flecks or the like to exist, after all
12. The Devil's Advocate (though, as given by Satan):
    "Let me give you a little inside information about God. God likes to watch. He's a prankster. Think about it: he gives man INSTINCTS. He gives you this extraordinary gift, and then what does he do - I swear, for his own amusement, his own private cosmic gag reel - he sets the rules in opposition. It's the goof of all-time. Look, but don't touch. Touch, but don't taste! Taste; don't swallow. And while you're jumping from one foot to the next, what is he doing? He's laughing his SICK, FUCKING ASS OFF! He's a tight ass! He's a SADIST! He's an absentee landlord! Worship that? Never!"
13. Feast of Love: Harry sadly suggests God either doesn't exist or else despises humanity in the wake of Oscar's tragic sudden death after he already lost his son as well. Bradley rejects this idea, and Harry doesn't seem to believe it firmly himself.
14. In Fight Club the narrator and Tyler Durden discuss this when Tyler tries to 'enlighten' the narrator by means of burning his hand with lye.
    Tyler Durden: Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God?
    Narrator: No, no, I... don't...
    Tyler Durden: Listen to me! You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, He hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen.
    Narrator: It isn't?
    Tyler Durden: We don't need Him!
15. Manhunter: Lektor insists this is the case, along with A God Am I.
    Lektor: Did you really feel depressed after you shot Mr. Garrett Jacob Hobbes to death? I think you probably did. But it wasn't the act that got to you. Didn't you feel so bad, because killing him felt so good? And why shouldn't it feel good? It must feel good to God. He does it all the time. God's terrific! He dropped a church roof on 34 of his worshipers in Texas last Wednesday night, just as they were groveling through a hymn to his majesty. Don't you think that felt good?
    Will: Why does it feel good, Dr. Lektor?
    Lektor: It feels good because God has power. If one does what God does enough times, one will become as God is. God's a champ. He always stays ahead. He got 140 Filipinos in one plane crash last year. Remember that earthquake in Italy last spring?
16. Quoted from Riddick in Pitch Black when questioned about his belief in God:
    "Think someone could spend half their life in a slam with a horse bit in their mouth and not believe? Think he could start out in some liquor-store trash bin with an umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and not believe? Got it all wrong, holy man. I absolutely believe in God... And I absolutely hate the fucker."
17. The Boys (2019): Butcher argues this to a Christian at the Believe Expo, saying if God exists he's cruel and hates humanity given how much suffering the world has.
18. Hand of God: Pernell rants that God is malicious and sadistic after PJ doesn't come out of his coma.
19. On Hannibal, this is Lecter's view: "Killing must feel good to God too-he does it all the time."
    1. Later, he speculates whether, if God exists, his killing people could actually be called "good" or "evil".
    2. In "Ko No Mono" Hannibal also states that his own "modest actions" pale in comparison with God's.
    3. Discussed once again in "Tome-Wan", where Hannibal speculates that to God innocence is offensive, thereby explaining the suffering of innocents.
20. Monty Python's "All things Dull and Ugly" parodies a Christian hymn, praising god for a number of bad things he created.
21. As might be surmised from the name, every other song by Death Metal band Deicide deals with how much they hate God. Whether or not frontman Glenn Benton actually believes in God's existence or is simply trolling Christians remains unclear.
22. Depeche Mode did not want to start any blasphemous rumours, but they think that God has a sick sense of humour (and when they die, they expect to find him... laughing).
23. XTC's "Dear God" from Skylarking: "Did you make disease...", "You're always letting us humans down/The wars you bring, the babes you drown..."
24. The song "Father, You're Not a Father" by the Death Metal band Immolation is about God being a rapist and a betrayer of men.
25. Alice in Chains was responsible for the song "God Am," in which lead singer Layne Staley vents about how much God has abandoned him. Staley was once reported to have said of God, "I didn't make me. I would've done a better job." There's also a line in the Alice in Chains song "Man In The Box" that says, "Jesus Christ (Deny Your Maker)." The first couple lines being "I'm the man in the box, buried in my shit, won't you come and save me". Apparently someone crying out to God and their cries are met with silence?
26. IAMX's "I Salute You Christopher" - which is dedicated to Christopher Hitchens - "Control yourselves,/ 'cause the man in the sky is a tyrant and a lonely psychopath/ Dreamed up to steal your minds."
27. A frequent theme in progressive sludge metal group The Ocean's lyrics. They even dedicated two albums to tearing down Christianity. Just look at some of their lyrics:
    "A world with God would be even more disturbing than a universe without him
    For if He tolerates atrocities
    If he condones such cruelty
    Who would want to worship such a maker anyway?"
    Roots & Locusts
28. The Book of Mormon has African villagers that blame God for all of their (legitimate) problems, such as AIDS, famine, and the tyrannical local Warlord. This is all detailed in the upbeat song Hasa Diga Eebowai.
    Mafala: When the world is getting you down, there's nobody else to blame.
    Raise your middle finger to the sky, and curse His rotten name!
29. The Reduced Shakespeare Company's Complete Millennium Musical has the parody Gospel song "Blame it on the Lord":
    Blame it on the Lord,
    When all of your prayers go completely ignored.
    Blame it on the Lord,
    When you and your family get put to the sword.
    Praise the Lord for the good he can do,
    But he can take the rap for the bad crap too.
30. King Lear: "As flies to wanton boys are we to th'gods/They kill us for their sport." Though by the end of the play, Gloucester's had ANOTHER Heel–Faith Turn.
31. In A Tale of Two Rulers, this is one of Zelda's two theories on the truth regarding Hyrule's patron trio: either they're long-dead mages still profiting from the world's biggest scam... or they're evil for letting Hyrule become so crapsack on their watch.
32. Played for Laughs in Society of Virtue where the superhero community treats the Second Coming of Christ like a typical "Physical God trying to bring about The End of the World as We Know It" scenario.
33. South Park:
    1. There was the episode where Stan asked Chef about God (because Kenny was dying... again) and their conversation went like this:
       Stan: Why would God let Kenny die, Chef? Why? Kenny's my friend. Why can't God take someone else's friend?
       Chef: Stan, sometimes God takes those closest to us, because it makes him feel better about himself. He is a very vengeful God, Stan. He's all pissed off about something we did thousands of years ago. He just can't get over it, so he doesn't care who he takes. Children, puppies, it don't matter to him, so long as it makes us sad. Do you understand?
       Stan: But then, why does God give us anything to start with?
       Chef: Well, look at it this way: if you want to make a baby cry, first you give it a lollipop. Then you take it away. If you never give it a lollipop to begin with, then you would have nothin' to cry about. That's like God, who gives us life and love and help just so that he can tear it all away and make us cry, so he can drink the sweet milk of our tears. You see, it's our tears, Stan, that give God his great power.
       Stan: I think I understand.
    2. In another episode, the local priest, during a eulogy for yet another person killed by geriatric drivers, takes the view that God just finds it funny, and leads the group in praying that God's had enough of a laugh and will stop killing people already.
34. This is a staple of many of Thomas Ligotti's stories, especially "Nethescurial", "The Tsalal", "The Shadow, The Darkness", and the Great Black Swine from My Work is Not Yet Done. "The Sect of the Idiot" actually opens with a quote regarding Azathoth (see above).^note From the Necronomicon, no less! From the ending of "Nethescurial":
    "See, there is no shape in the fireplace. The smoke is gone, gone up the chimney and out into the sky. And there is nothing in the sky, nothing I can see through the window. There is the moon, of course, high and round. But no shadow falls across the moon, no churning chaos of smoke that chokes the frail order of the earth, no shifting cloud of nightmares enveloping moons and suns and stars. It is not a squirming, creeping, smearing shape I see upon the moon, not the shape of a great deformed crab scuttling out of the black oceans of infinity and invading the island of the moon, crawling with its innumerable bodies upon all the spinning islands of inky space. That shape is not the cancerous totality of all creatures, not the oozing ichor that flows within all things. Nethescurial is not the secret name of the creation. It is not in the rooms of houses and beyond their walls... beneath dark waters and across moonlit skies... below earth mound and above mountain peak... in northern leaf and southern flower... inside each star and the voids between them... within blood and bone, through all souls and spirits... among the watchful winds of this and the several worlds... behind the faces of the living and the dead."
35. The Mysterious Stranger features Satan, the sinless nephew of that Satan, delivering a speech stating that reality is a dream, because a world where God does such evil things and is still worshiped as good is clearly the nonsensical creation of an unconscious mind. Part of this speech can be found in the Quotes section of this very page.
36. In Catch-22, Yossarian's rant against God starts out as God Is Inept and goes to God Is Evil:
    "And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways," Yossarian continued. ..."There's nothing mysterious about it, He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?"
37. The protagonist of The Gadfly, Arthur, a discouraged Christian turned atheist, is arrested for smuggling weapons into Italy for a revolution. Before his execution, a cardinal named Montanelli visits him, who happens to be his childhood mentor and the man he once revered. Arthur proposes to reconcile with Montanelli if he abandons Christianity and helps Arthur escape from prison. Montanelli chooses his faith over Arthur and the next morning, when Arthur is executed, he lays in Montanelli's arms and remarks how his death was like a sacrifice to God.

Jerkass Gods (6)

1. To Reign in Hell doesn't have God as being necessarily evil as much as a bit thick and egotistical. Of course, the same novel has Satan as an indecisive schlep until it's too late. The whole split between them seems to be an easily avoidable mistake.
2. In Spawn, God and Satan are portrayed as, though not exactly "evil," essentially the cosmic equivalent of spoiled teenagers who enjoy breaking each other's stuff. It's the fact that this includes us that causes this to become a problem. Oh, and He's not actually the Creator.
3. Played with in Angels in America: God isn't evil per se, but he is a serious Jerkass who abandoned Heaven a couple decades back, leaving the Angels in disarray and despair. It takes Prior, who has had a similar bad experience recently with a man walking out on him, to knock some sense into them, and say "Screw him!".
4. In Wily's Defense features Sphere. He isn't exactly evil but he's basically a lazy, irresponsible, and petty Jerkass who is apathetic towards the actions of his destructive children. He shows more concern over a random guy calling himself the "God Of Flames" than he does over the angels of death and destruction going to war with each other.
5. Family Guy mostly uses the idea that God Is Flawed, but on a few occasions, does show him to be a real jerk, such as people with disabilities on Earth remaining disabled in Heaven for some reason (which looks like a Sandals resort). He's also been shown to be rather short and annoyed with his followers.
6. South Park: God has appeared in person a few times (for some reason, He looks like a chimpanzee with a hippo's head), and while not portrayed as outright evil, does seem rather annoyed with how whiny and needy his creations are, even Satan (who has gone from a badass rebel to a wimpy loser stuck in unhealthy relationships) and Jesus (who has completely lost his ability to inspire humanity and relies on rehashing his old teachings).

God of Evil (10)

1. Silent Hill has the "goddess" (actually a powerful monster) of The Order who acts as The Big Bad for a number of the games. Whether she's a true god or just another monster willed into being by delusional worshippers in anyone's guess.
2. In the Crapsack World of Demon's Souls, Magic is explained as power that comes from the human (Or demon) will, and Faith is explained as a power that comes from God. For this reason, Faith-users are usually pretty rude toward ungodly mages. This is all well and good, but in multiple places in the game you can discover that the "god" that faith users actually get their power from is the world-destroying Big Bad Demon Overlord, the Old One, and that faith users are not aware of this. Whether the religion is completely wrong, or whether (even worse) the Old One actually IS God is not revealed. However, faith coming from the Old One is implied by Sage Freke in an optional conversation, and confirmed by the item description of the Talisman of Beasts.
3. A disproportionate number of Breath of Fire games use the world's leading god as their Final Boss, mostly because the Sorting Algorithm of Evil says not much else should be powerful enough to faze them by the end of the game. In some cases, like Breath of Fire III, they portray the realization that you are going to have to fight and kill God with the weight such a goal would bring.
   1. Myria and Deathevan are actually more like cases of Gods of Evil because they are not the world's only deities. Ladon, the dragon god who appears throughout the game, is actually a pretty cool guy, especially in the third game where he can actually teach you some of his abilities by acting as a Master.
4. In Bayonetta 2, there is Loptr, who is the evil side of Aesir, Creator-God of the mortal world. Created when Aesir decided to divide his powers and give them to humanity so humans would have free will, he wants to take control of reality back from them by any means necessary.
5. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The First Evil is older than the universe as exists since before the Big Bang. This is the reason why creepy serial murderer priest Caleb considers it to be God.
6. The concept of the game Midnight (2003) is fighting hopelessly against the Evil God Izrador who rules the world. However, Izrador is not the Creator, but merely the evil member of a pantheon exiled to the mortal world. However Izrador, being a god of chaos and corruption, screwed up the seal that locked him into the world. Instead of being a world where every being except Izrador could enter and leave at will (by normal Dungeons & Dragons standards), nobody is free to enter or leave, not even the other gods of the pantheon.
7. The Shadow of the Demon Lord RPG from Schwalb Entertainment, has Warhammer Fantasy as one of its biggest influences. In this Crapsack World, Cosmic Horror Dark Fantasy RPG, the universe is under threat from the all-consuming, near omnipotent Demon Lord, the most powerful being in existence. The Demon Lord is actually God himself, but with his best bits removed by ambitious genies when he was taking a break after creation. Sure he's a lot less powerful now, but he's all spite and rage with plenty of sadism mixed in too.
8. The Morce from "Space Blood" has two evil sides with its two god-like incarnations being evil. It is also a bit of an inversion as the Morce is made of Evil as a case of Evil Is God.
9. Mother in Revival is an Eldritch Abomination that absorbes the souls of everyone who dies and seem to be worshiped as a god by its ant-like minions.
10. Godspeaker Trilogy: The God of the Mijaki is portrayed in this way... except it's actually a dark power that they believe to be a god.

God Guise (9)

1. The GBA port of Breath of Fire II also throws a spanner into the works by implying that Deathevn is not actually a god, despite being Myria's descendant. Rather, he's actually a draconic Eldritch Abomination that's merely posing as one because it's fun to fuck with mortals.
2. In Shadow Hearts, "God" is a world-destroying alien monster which doesn't have any dialogue. Although, it's explained by the real Roger Bacon that it isn't truly a god, but rather something that's as far above humans as humans are above ants (or further).
3. Xenogears. Sort of. Deus isn't actually a "God", though it did create the branch of humanity on the planet in question. It's really just a genetically engineered planet-destroying bio-weapon that's somehow become even more powerful than its job description would imply. There's also the Wave Existence/Zohar, which seems to be the "true" God of Xenogears, and late in the game it empowers the main character to become even more superhuman than he already was. This is actually a Gnostic allegory, with Deus playing the false god Demiurge and the Wave Existence playing the Source — the distant, unknowable true creator whose role Demiurge unwittingly usurped.
4. In AdventureQuest, The Stranger/Seth Cay Dhows was revealed to be a man made god known by the name Epsilon. Also, Falerin is actually an (Affably) Evil God.
5. The song "War is my Destiny" by rapper Ill Bill implies that the Devil (not that one — when the War in Heaven ended, the Fallen Angels dethroned Satan and crowned a new leader in his place) convinced humanity that he was God and proceeded to make their lives miserable. Whenever God sent prophets to save the people (yes, there were multiple messiahs), the fallen angels hunted them down and burned them. Eventually God unleashed the Flood and destroyed the kingdoms of the fallen. After the flood, the Devil allowed the prophets to live, only so he could twist the word of God and humanity would worship him once again, thinking they were worshipping God. Basically what it boils down to is that while God Is Good, the guy that everyone thinks is God is very, very evil.
6. In Andrew Kepple's Animutation trilogy Colin Mochrie vs. Jesus H. Christ, after saving everyone from Colin Mochrie after he gets turned into a rampaging Scotsman, Jesus takes over the world and starts persecuting characters from "fanimutations". At the end of Part 3, it turns out "Jesus" is actually Mike Brady, who starred alongside Colin in Neil Cicirega's "The Japanese Pokerap" but was jealous that Colin became a Breakout Character, and orchestrated the whole thing in order to get revenge.
7. In Warren Ellis's comic The Authority, the main superhero team actually fight "God," which turns out to be a gigantic pyramid-like entity which created the Earth as a "retirement home" (unfortunately, its home environment looks like Mordor crossed with a Xenomorph hive) and is bugged when it returns to find humanity has since evolved (life on Earth was a total accident caused by a random meteor strike billions of years ago) and intends to keep on living there. They end up frying its brains out, assuring the civilization of sentient intestinal parasites living in it that only the higher brain functions will be affected, letting them survive. Unusual for this trope, this alien "God" has nothing to do with humans, just with planet Earth itself.
8. In 616, God made it so that just all the humanity is condemned to Hell and there's no salvation possible. It gets subverted, however, when it's revealed that God is actually Satan, who won the War in Heaven and is letting us believe otherwise. But it's subverted again because Satan is not evil either, and in fact went literally My God, What Have I Done? after he reaped the results of his victory.
9. In Dragon Quest VII, when you resurrect God, he immediately begins an evil tyrannical regime that confuses and subjugates the newly reunited world. However, this turns into a subversion as "God" is actually the thought-to-be-defeated Demon Lord in disguise. You eventually do fight God, but it's as a Bonus Boss outside of anything resembling the plot.

Demiurge Archetype (2)

1. Cerebus the Aardvark crossed the line into Cerebus Syndrome when its author began proposing such theories through the mouth of his barbarian-turned-intellectual main character. To be more precise (and yet dumb down the theories), Sim's argument isn't that God is evil, it's that the YHWH of the Old Testament and God are two separate entities, and the conflict between them stems from the YHWH having a massive inferiority complex.
2. KULT is a Gnostic horror game, so you know this trope's in the cards. The Demiurge/Creator put the curse of death on mankind, stripping away their immortality and most of their powers. Then, he disappeared, and Astaroth/Satan is looking for him, since the Demiurge is the only one who gave his life some sense. The devil is quite alone in this search — nobody else wants God to come back. It is also stated that God did not create the true world, and it's implied that it was a great place to live in until God came along and ruined it.

Not Quite the Almighty (2)

1. Job: A Comedy of Justice (inspired by the Book of Job) sets up and subverts the trope in a strange way. "God" and Satan are revealed to be equal players in a much greater game, several ranks below the true Supreme Being, and the false god is the jerk of the two, who insists on worship and relies upon inconsistent and unkind rules to rein in his creations.
2. There are two Gods in Letters from the Earth. God — Real God — is mostly unconcerned with humanity and thinks of them all as an amusing experiment. He is short with Satan for Satan mouthing off and has a temper. However, Real God is not evil. In contrast, Satan writes about the Biblical God as a totem invented by a small tribe of men — and describes Him as one depraved monster, a megalomaniacal hypocrite who, among other things, not only punishes sinners for minor offenses, but also innocents simply because they were part of the same civilization as the sinners. Satan was thrown out of Heaven for asking too many questions about the contradictions of the Biblical God's law.

1. Nameless (2015) by Grant Morrison: An Eldritch Abomination Made of Evil imprisoned on an asteroid is directly responsible for the very concept of God in the human psyche.
2. In Final Fantasy Tactics, the final boss is a thinly disguised Expy of Jesus.

   1. Granted, the entire thing was essentially expanding on the Pharisee argument found in the Bible - Is Jesus' power really divine in origin, or is he meant to tempt people from the true path/faith? Pretty damn serious subject-matter for a T-rated video game, and one that could be completely missed by anyone not familiar with the subject matter.
   2. The above is the result of poor translation (something the PS1 version was well known for). The plot of the PSP version has the final boss as a false prophet type plotting to use Lucavi to rule the world. The Beoluve family are blood descendants of the person who stopped him the last time.
   3. The dominant in-universe religion, however, holds that the final boss really is a Jesus-like figure. Thus, their equivalent of the Bible is a lie, and the "god" they worship is actually a demon. Whether a true God exists in the FFT world is never specified.
   4. The "true god/s" of FFT would be the Occuria of ''Final Fantasy XII', as it's the same world. Their elimination is the only thing that allowed Ultima and the rest of the Lucavi to destroy the world of Ivalice in the first place. So yeah.

3. God in The Chronicles of Wormwood (by ...you guessed it, Garth Ennis) is another example, as He's apparently insane or severely mentally deficient; then there's also the fact that he's in league with Satan to bring about the biblical Apocalypse, over the objections of their much nicer sons Jay and Wormwood. Also of note: This version of God seems to really, really, really love masturbating (something of a Running Gag in Ennis' works).
4. The Rapture: Sharon comes to believe this. The film explores this question, since not only believers but atheists get a chance to enter heaven but only if they accept God. Sharon is only left out by her own choice.
5. Extremely common in Black Metal songs. Deathspell Omega in particular has basically made a career of this (though it should be noted that this does not mean they think Satan Is Good). Some black metal groups go even further - straight into Refuge in Audacity territory - by portraying God as weak and pathetic, and writing songs about humiliating Him.
6. In "How Do You Do?" Shakira has an honest conversation with God about His cruelties. However, she forgives Him.
7. "Remnant (March of the Undead IV)" by Machinae Supremacy uses a Zombie Apocalypse as a metaphor to criticize religious followers who insist that God is benevolent despite doing nothing to keep horrible things from happening. The song even implies that God enjoys watching the destruction he causes through inaction.
8. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal seems to be quite fond of this trope and frequently uses it for jokes. It varies between this, God Is Flawed and Mad God. For example, there is a strip where an atheist argues against the idea of Hell, by stating that, being omnipotent, God already knows any action a human will take in their lifetime, so it makes no sense to punish them for it. So either, Hell doesn't exist, or God is a jerk.
   Satan: Struck by lightning?
   Atheist: Struck by lightning...
9. In Wulffmorgenthaler, God and Satan agree on God being the evil one after flipping a coin.
10. Some interpretations of Mr. Deity are this. He's not so much actively evil as tremendously uncaring.
11. In Wonder Showzen. God appears as an evil, creepy voice. Of course, that's not surprising considering what kind of show it is...
12. William Blake,^note While he was devoutly religious, he hated the authority and moral dictates of church. His mythopoeiaic character Urizen strongly resembles the traditional Demiurge (Blake was heavily influenced by Gnosticism), and is often used to represent the oppressive God of the Church. beginning with his The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell and elaborated in his poem about John Milton, turned the tables to posit that mistakes are innocent and perfection is villainous. C. S. Lewis actually wrote a response to Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell called The Great Divorce, in which denizens of Hell actually always have the chance to go to Heaven, but very few of them want to stay there — the nature of an evil person is such that the damned, each for a different reason of his own, find the perfection of Heaven repugnant. Those who do decide to stay find in retrospect that Hell, for them, was merely Purgatory.
13. The Stand also has some elements of this near the end, with many protagonists' deaths being likened to sacrifices to God so that He'll personally interfere with Randall Flagg's plans (in a way that kills virtually all his "followers", including children whose only fault was being with adults who went to Flagg's side). One character gets so fed up with this that she cusses out God when she hears that her love interest has a divine mandate to go on what is likely a suicide mission to stop Flagg.
14. In Dean Koontz's earlier works, God Is Evil or at least God is Insane, as seen in Fear That Man and A Darkness in My Soul. In Dragon Tears, the villain seeks to become the New God, and his plans for the world are also as horrific as this trope can imagine.
15. Eloat in Burying the Shadow is an alternate-world interpretation of God that has gone power mad and refuses to give up power to his heir Sammael.
16. Lester del Rey's short story "For I Am a Jealous People" has God's Chosen Aliens doing unto Earth what God's Chosen People used to do to other humans.
17. The protagonist of Horns concludes that the reason why God allowed his ex-girlfriend to be raped and killed is because he is actually not very fond of humans, and detests women in particular, because they, like him, can create life and also because they can redefine love as they see fit. He also compares him to a gangster, only offering his protection in exchange for blind faith and worship.
    • Is God an actual character in this work, or is this Rage Against the Heavens?
18. Subverted in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. Kreia believes the Force to be an evil god that forces the Jedi and Sith to war with each other for eternity for its own amusement. Yet all evidence in the game and other Star Wars material pretty clearly suggests that this isn't true; even if the Force is sentient (which is debatable) than it has no influence on what mortals do with its gifts. The implication builds to be that Kreia is simply unwilling to accept her own flaws and sins, so she instead chooses to pass off the blame to some vague force in the sky. Further her stated solution to this (destroying the Force) is noted to be absolutely insane and would likely kill every living being in the galaxy since there's a trace of Force presence in all life.
    1. An alternate interpretation of Kreia's beliefs is that the Force is not a god, but may as well be treated as one because it is composed of the connections that people constantly create between each other and the consequences that ripple throughout the cosmos. As for the evil part, the Jedi and Sith would, by natural selection, favor select courses of action that would strengthen the Force and therefore themselves, and since the most effective way to make varied peoples of isolated communities make interpersonal connections of politics and commerce, interest and fear, love and hatred, across distances measured in lightyears, is to instigate a war between stars... well...
    • Well, is the Force evil or isn't it? Can the Force even be considered a "god" for the purposes of this trope? Is it sapient or even capable of making clear decisions?

1. Final Fantasy XV: DLC reveals that Bahamut intentionally drove Ardyn insane and orchestrated the apocalypse 2,000 years in advance, with all the civil wars in between, just to cure a demon epidemic. The novels^note jury's out on whether or not they are canon go further; Bahamut intended to use the power from defeating the Starscourge to wipe out the world and start over. All for the crime of having individuality.
2. In Alundra, Melzas is actually the god who is worshiped by the citizens of Inoa, which makes him more powerful. And then he starts killing them off.
3. The White Queen in The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign. She's seen as all-powerful and benevolent, but only the former is true. She's actually an incredible Yandere for Kyousuke, the main character, and doesn't care for anyone else. Unlike other examples of this trope, she doesn't hate humanity... but she's willing to do anything to make Kyousuke love her again, including endangering the entire world, so there's effectively no difference.
4. Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest: Ehit is the main, final antagonist Hajime and his party must fight in order to save the world. Being the one behind most of the horrible things that happen in the story, he kickstarts the plot by having Hajime and his class kidnapped so he could possess Kouki and use his body to destroy Tortus and travel to other worlds to start over - as he entertains himself with the suffering of mortals, considering them mere toys for him to use and throw away.
5. The motivating idea behind all of the Millennium Earl's actions in D.Gray-Man. Considering that said God seemingly allows the existence of someone as monstrously malevolent as the Earl, he may have a point.
6. Dragon Ball Super introduces Zeno, who hosts a tournament between entire universes that will destroy all but the winner, and which turns out to actually be a Secret Test of Character at the end of which all universes involved are restored. That being said, he did destroy six other universes for real over an unspecified, implied-to-be-trivial cause at a much earlier point in time.
7. Deus Ex Machina from Future Diary. Sure, he's about to die and is taking the world down with him, but picking his successor by forcing mostly innocent people to fight a battle royale for the lulz? Not to mention telling a 4-year-old to kill (semi)-innocent people. Later revealed to be the result of a Batman Gambit by another of the Diary Holders, John Bacchus, who told Deus to have a last conflict before he died, and hence took all the winning cards with him as a reward. Eventually Subverted in the Third Continuity, where Deus just makes Yuno Gasai the God without any bloodshed.
8. Princess Tutu has the eccentric sadist Drosselmeyer to contend with: a dead writer whose influence, and love of tragedy, still haunt Kinkan Town.
9. Clive Barker's Next Testament has Wick, the Father of Colors. He's petty, he seeps the life force out of people, levitates them and lets them plummet to their death, makes their heads explode, forces them to build monuments in his honor and ultimately becomes an Omnicidal Maniac. Also, he fucking hates free will.
10. Titan from The Immortal Game. Imagine O'Brien from Nineteen Eighty-Four with the powers of an elder god. And his wife/daughter Terra is almost as bad.
11. The Vocaloid song "Honey I'm Home" features an evil god with an incredibly creepy appearance who literally vivisects the protagonist.
12. Oglaf:The adherents of the Cult of Sithrak the Blind Gibberer believe that Sithrak is a cruel and gruesome god who tortures his worshippers for all eternity. This is actually the main draw of the religion, since it completely absolves you of moral quandries. Doesn't matter if you're good or evil, Sithrak will torture you either way. Of course, it turns out that Sithrak is actually a decent guy, and the cult is based on some angsty teenage poetry of his.
13. In The Beginning After the End, Kezess Indrath is first introduced as King of Asuras, Father of Sylvia, grandfather of Sylvie and heroic counterpart to Agrona Vrita, the Big Bad of the story. He trained Sylvie and brought Arthur to Epheotus to be trained for the war against the Vritra. Sylvia's next message reveals that Kezess is the main catalyst for Agrona's madness and Djinn genocide regarding aether knowledge making him a tyrant no better than Agrona. Later, Kezess orders Aldir to use the worldeater technique to destroy Elenoir to prevent the legacy from being summoned the attempt fails but it drives the elves to near extinction this causes Arthur to swear to take Kezess down. Elenoir's destruction backfire on him as Aldir rebells against him and the Dicathen resistance learn of the truth they refuse Kezess's Help. This stings his pride and send as Asura named Taci to wipe them out this fail as Taci is killed by Arthur who has escaped from Alacrya.

Not the Abrahamic God, sole creator deity, or "supreme deity" of a pantheon, or multiple gods are evil

1. Onimusha: In this game's verse, the Creation Myth is different than the usual world. The Genma race was the one that existed since primordial chaos and then sired mankind as a Slave Race for their own, and they think it existed only as nourishment and slave for them. And their leader, Fortinbras, wants to make sure that it stays that way, when the humans started gaining free will and rebelled against it.
2. Dishonored plays with this trope like pipe organ. The dominant religion of the setting is the Abbey of the Everyman, which recognizes only one deity, the Outsider, but claims that it is very evil indeed, directly responsible for all human sin and the source of all witchcraft. Corvo's experience with the Outsider, however, proves that while he is indeed the source of all magic (and most magic-users really are bad news) he is also by-and-large an observer, and that he imposes no demands on those he empowers. Apparently, he has just chosen a lot of untrustworthy people to empower, probably because power corrupts and the world is most often changed by ambitious bastards.
3. The Golden Sun series subverts this. Yes, the Wise One can be a very harsh taskmaster and is not against setting people trials that would shatter lesser minds. However, it has a very good reason for being something of a Knight Templar: namely the fact that it's already seen what kind of Crapsack World Alchemy can create. As such, it wants to make damn sure that it's used for good and that nobody screws the world over again with it. Now, the actual Ancients on the other hand - who possessed even greater power, given that they created the Wise One are far more morally ambiguous given that they were the ones who ruined the world in the first place. The Wise One is in fact simply a powerful golem created for the purpose of keeping Alchemy sealed. The reason it went to such lengths was because it was re-evaluating its original directives in light of new information (mainly that keeping Alchemy sealed would doom the world to a slow death anyway), but needed to make sure that people were ready for the potential problems Alchemy would bring if it was brought back.
4. In the Legacy of Kain games, the Elder God is in many ways the Big Bad of the series; it tells Raziel it resurrected him and that its Wheel of Fate is a force of life, but the time-travelling Raziel notices that it seems to grow as the land deteriorates, and eventually concludes that it parasitically feeds on the souls of the dead and manipulatively causes death and destruction in order to provide itself with fresh souls. However, since serious questions are raised about the full extent of its power (Raziel suspects that it might have simply been there when he recovered of his own accord and simply claimed responsibility for his survival, and it heavily relies on agents for much of its success,) it is debatable whether it can really be considered a god, especially since Kain takes the supposedly omniscient being completely by surprise and kicks its ass at the end of the series.
5. Viking: Battle for Asgard: You know Freya? Yeah, she's kinda evil. The kind of evil that brings you back to life with the promise that she'll give you a chance to enter Valhalla if you kill someone for her and then realizes the benefits of having a personal assassin and promptly stabs you in the back. Skarin was not pleased and suffice it to say, it did not end well if you happened to be a God.
6. In Drakengard, The World Is Always Doomed because God Is Evil. The gods that the hierarchs in the Crystal Dragon Jesus religion pray to for salvation are in fact the ones trying to destroy the world. When they show up towards the game's finale, they appear as giant, man-eating babies. Yeah. As far as who created the world, the debate is out whether the gods did or the dragons did.
   1. Drakengard 3 sheds some light on the Cult of the Watchers and exactly what it is that they're worshiping. The goddess that the cult worships is none other than the Intoner One, with the cult being started by her Opposite-Sex Clone "brother" in order to honor her after her death. While One is a benevolent individual, as an Intoner she is destined to destroy the world unless she and her sisters are killed.
7. Odin in Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria is ready to destroy the entire mortal world rather than face the possibility that humans will stop serving the gods unquestioningly. Lezard doesn't seem that bad all of the sudden. He is somewhat Lawful Evil in the first Valkyrie Profile, too. After all he is fine destroying the order of the mortal world by stealing its sacred treasure just to have a mighty artifact for himself and to help Lenneth to recruit more Einherjar.
   1. Odin and the other gods are also shown to be completely apathetic towards Midgard. They sit on golden thrones in magnificent castles, while the world underneath is one of the darkest, most dismal worlds you can imagine.
8. Mortal Kombat let's just say doesn't exactly portray its gods in the best light.
   1. The Elder Gods certainly qualify; while hiding behind an Obstructive Code of Conduct of non-interference with their own creation, they've either downright ignored imminent threats to the Realms and breaking of sacred laws (like they did with Shao Kahn's invasion of Earth in MK 3), or manipulated proxies into doing their dirty work through elaborate Gambit Roulettes that have as much of a chance of succeeding as a snowball surviving in the burning heart of Hell, with wonderful non-rewards for doing a "good job" (have pity for Scorpion and his family and clan, or Taven and his family and friends). And when one of their own does decide to interfere, they're punished violently, regardless of whether their intent was malefic or innocent. Makes you wonder why no one's gone up there to kick their deific asses, yet...
      1. Of particular mention when it comes to the Elder Gods is Shinnok and Cetrion, with Shinnok being one of the main villains of the franchise with tons of horrible crimes under his belt, also while Shinnok is a traitor he did still commit evil actions during his time as an Elder God. Cetrion is not much better as she betrays and kills all her fellow Elder Gods and was secretly a mole for Kronika.
   2. Even Raiden could also qualify, depending on the game. In his Armageddon ending, he became increasingly aggressive in his protection of Earth, going as far as to destroy all other realms (both threatening and non-threatening ones) to prevent them from being a danger to Earth. And in his ending in the original game, Raiden wins the Mortal Kombat tournament, but soon becomes bored with human competition and invites other gods to participate in the tournament, which ends up destroying the planet.
   3. The Elder Gods are motivated less by malice and more by fear of the One Being, the true supreme being whom they rebelled against and separated into the Realms. Everything they do is meant to keep the One Being from ever coming back. The One Being would qualify as an example of this trope as well, since the reason the Elder Gods rebelled against it was because it was eating them (and would likely do the same to everything else in creation if it came back).
   4. Mortal Kombat 11 reveals that The One is NOT the only Titan. The game's main antagonist, Kronika, is the Titan of Time (and the mother of one of the Elder Gods). Her ultimate goal is to set up a Forever War that ensures neither side will ever win, and will hit the Reset Button when she doesn't get her way. Repeatedly. Scorpion's ending reveals images of other Titans who also mess around with mortals, and are the reason why his family's death is a fixed event in time.
9. Xenosaga has a subversion. While Dimitri Yuriev believes the Dimension Lord Energy Being U-DO is evil, and it does have a tendency to cause people to go insane when it touches their minds, it isn't evil, just alien.
10. Record of Agarest War has the six Dark Gods/Goddesses, five of which are sealed within the false world of Agarest's five pillars located on each of the five continents. Mercury for Lucrellia's pillar, Mobius for Graccea's pillar, Deeth for Fendia's pillar, Nemesis for Enhambre's pillar, and Mayastia for Aegisthus's pillar. The sole exception of the six is Chaos, the highest among them, though despite his title, he is not "completely evil", since while he embodies his title, he is sealed in the Boundary Plane, a realm of existence outside of Agarest. He still can be considered "evil" for what he intends to do to roughly gouge out the "truth" of Agarest in his own image, had the Oathsworn legacy and their trusted companions not stopped him.
11. God of War had a recurring theme that the higher Gods of mythologies were actually evil, self-serving assholes that used their powers to toy around humanity while ruling the land, they are now incapable of doing good deeds like the original mythology did. While the resident god-killer/protagonist Kratos is definitely no saint and can get really murderous when he's pissed off, he came off a lot better and humanized than these evil Gods that paraded as champions of mankind and protectors of the world. To name a few:
    1. Ares; not only did he trick his champion into murdering their own family, but subsequent games reveal he wanted to conquer Olympus with an Ax-Crazy champion, and abandoned his own son when he didn't live up to the standards of a war god. The other Greek gods got fed up with his constant raids on their patron cities and tasked Kratos with taking him out. Kratos also regresses into Ax-Crazy when he takes Ares' position, gleefully torturing and brutalizing his defeated enemies and innocent civilians for no reason beyond stress relief.
    2. Zeus from God of War II is particularly paranoid and vengeful, attacking Kratos for the possibility that Kratos might kill and usurp him in the future. To be fair, though, Zeus was the same way in classic Greek myth, and Kratos would probably do it. In III, it's revealed that Kratos corrupted Zeus when he opened Pandora's Box in the first game to defeat Ares. To be frank, the Gods did EVERYTHING necessary to deserve Kratos' wrath. They assumed his brother would destroy them, so they kidnapped him and made him Thanatos' prisoner. Ares then manipulates and fools him into killing his own family. After 10 years of service, Kratos kills Ares both for his revenge and their last mission, and they refuse to relieve him from his nightmares. He tries to commit suicide, but rather they turn him into the God of War. Then Kratos finds out about all Deimos, they have his mother cursed into a monster, forcing him to kill her, and kill his brother minutes after they made up. When Kratos snaps and goes on a conquest, Zeus responds by slaughtering his army, and the rebels trying to fight back against Kratos, in an arrogant display of power, and destroys Sparta just to rub it in. Really, they EARNED their karmic punishment! In God of War (PS4), Mimir outright states that the Greek Pantheon had it coming.
    3. And throughout the series, the Greek pantheon is shown to have control over the world itself and its suffering, yet they obsess over torturing the weak, and bicker in their spare time. Those monsters that fight Kratos throughout the series? Those are created in the underworld from human souls to periodically terrorize the world of the living. Whenever the gods bicker, they wage horrendous wars with little care to the cannon fodder and civilians that get in the way. The gods killed all the Titans "for the sins of just one", then they locked up the souls that survived to be tortured for eternity, because they could.
    4. The Asgardians in God of War (PS4). All of the lore that is found throughout the game revolves around Odin and/or Thor being ultra-racist, murderous jackasses. Mostly confirmed by their victims.
    5. God of War Ragnarök cements Odin as a textbook sociopath who runs Asgard like a mega-corporation. Every sentence that comes out of his mouth is either a brazen lie or meant to mislead, he constantly abuses/manipulates his sons and generally views them like employees or tools (hence the reason they're all so screwed up), and frequently murders anyone who dares to resist his constant control, which includes multiple genocides. He enslaved the dwarves to make him personalized war weapons, and then used mortals as meatshields for psychological warfare. To 'hammer' in how truly empty he is, Odin murders Thor in a fit of rage during Ragnarok for daring to defy his father's increasingly brutish orders. And all of this somehow pales in comparison to a sick project he greenlit, where his unhinged fanatic cultists hung their own children, whose souls were then reforged into spirit animals and Odin's personal spies.
12. The fal'Cie, from Final Fantasy XIII and its sequels. While some just have Blue-and-Orange Morality, nearly all of them doom humans by unwillingly turning them into l'Cie. Their creator isn't any better.

    1. This goes even further in the final game, Lightning Returns. The god Bhunivelze orders the Heroine, Lightning, to save as many souls as possible from despair, in return for her sister's resurrection from the dead. But Lightning later discovers he intends to leave everyone else behind and murder anyone he doesn't deem worthy to live in his ideal world, which leads her to defy him and try to become the new goddess whom will give all souls a second chance.

13. Final Fantasy XII has the Occuria, a pantheon of very powerful godlike spirits who have manipulated the development of mortal life on Ivalice for centuries in an ongoing Gambit Roulette, selecting and manipulating various humans as their champions, including the player characters. Ironically, they are opposed by one of their own, a rogue Occuria who has allied with the Evil Overlord in an attempt to break the Occuria's domination over humanity in a Gambit Roulette of their own, unfortunately causing tremendous misery and destruction in their attempts to do so.
14. The Elder Scrolls series has several types of deity, which play with this trope in different ways:
    1. Lorkhan, the creator deity who tricked/convinced some of his fellow et'Ada ("original spirits") to create Mundus, the mortal plane, is viewed as a malevolent entity by most of the races of Mer (Elves). They consider creation a malevolent act which robbed the pre-creation spirits of their divinity and forced them into the prison of the mortal world where they experience death and suffering. (The races of Men, on the other hand, generally see Lorkhan as benevolent entity who freed the pre-creation spirits from a prison of unchanging stasis.)
    2. Those et'Ada who aided Lorkhan in creating Mundus would become known as the Aedra ("Our Ancestors" in Old Aldmeris). Due to being severely weakened by the act of creation, they rarely influence mortal affairs directly. They tend to be worshiped by mortals, both Men and Mer, for their contribution as the "Divines" and are mostly believed to be benevolent. One possible exception, depending on the interpretation, is Akatosh, the draconic God of Time and Top God of the Nine Divines pantheon. According to one prominent theory, the dragons, including Alduin, are fragments of his being. Dragons are beings of destruction and domination, with Alduin having the responsibility of "eating the world" at the end of every "kalpa", or cycle of time.
    3. The et'Ada who did not aid Lorkhan are known as the Daedra ("Not Our Ancestors"). Of them, the 17 most powerful are known as the Daedric Princes. Each has a particular sphere, which the are said to govern from their planes of Oblivion (the infinite void around Mundus) which they inhabit and rule. Though most are considered "evil," scholars are quick to point out that they are really beings Above Good and Evil who operate on their own Blue-and-Orange Morality. The "Good" ones only seem that way because what they seek to accomplish is generally beneficial or benevolent toward mortals, while the "Evil" ones are more likely to harm mortals with their actions. For instance, Mehrunes Dagon is the Daedric Prince of Destruction, but can be considered no more "evil" than a tidal wave or an earthquake.
    4. Morrowind:
       1. In the main quest, Big Bad Dagoth Ur is a true Physical God, having tapped into the power of the Heart of Lorkhan. He channels his power from it, and has essentially become an Eldritch Abomination. The implication is that Dagoth Ur has discovered an unspeakably dangerous middle-ground between CHIM, Amaranth and Zero-Sum where he exists in a godlike state because of his awareness of Anu's Dream but, unlike CHIM where he exists as one with it and maintains his own individuality, Amaranth where he exits the Dream to make his own, or Zero-Sum where he simply fades into the Dream, Dagoth Ur's twisted, traumatized and broken mind is being imprinted on the Dream of Anu. Naturally, the Nerevarine must sever his (and the Tribunal's) ties to the Heart in order to stop him.
       2. In the Tribunal expansion, the main quest ends with the Nerevarine having to kill Almalexia, one of the Tribunal gods. The loss of her divine power has driven her mad. She has already killed another Tribunal god, Sotha Sil, and wants you to die as a martyr.
    5. In the Shivering Isles expansion for Oblivion you find out that Jyggalag, the Daedric Prince of Order, became so powerful he threatened the other Daedric Princes, and thus was cursed with madness, transforming him into Sheogorath. You then free Jyggalag and take the mantle of Sheogorath.
15. In the backstory of Dwarf Fortress (insofar as a fantasy world simulator can have a backstory), the supreme deity, Armok, God of Blood, loves conflict and creates worlds in order that conflict may occur. As the world approaches stability, Armok destroys and recreates the world anew. In a meta sense, Armok is the player, who is likely to generate a new world when their current one becomes peaceful (and therefore boring).
    1. The regular gods in the game are no better, cursing mortals with vampirism and therianthropy, bestowing slabs containing the secret of animating the dead, and raising demons from the underworld, all in the name of creating further conflict.
16. In Dragon Age: Origins, Archdemons that lead Darkspawn hordes are Old Gods of the Tevinter corrupted by the Blight. The Maker is kind of an asshole of a god, instead of just killing the Tevinter mages that attempted to breach the Golden City, he cursed them to spread devastation in their wake and sent them to destroy the mortal world.
17. Dragalia Lost: Xenos is a bit of a deconstruction. When he initially created the world with the help of Bahamut, he was optimistic about what humanity would be able to accomplish. These hopes would quickly be dashed, since humanity would continue to wage war on each other, end up wiping themselves out due to their stupidity, and repeatedly attack Xenos, hoping to seek his power. He wiped them out and gave them another chance time and time again, but every single time, they would end up making the exact same mistakes. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that humanity was completely a lost cause, and that the only way that they would ever prosper is if their free will was taken away from them. That is why Xenos wants to create a world where nobody gets to decide what their future is going to be like, and all of their choices are made for them, regardless of their opinions.
    • Not clear how this is a deconstruction, either
18. Divinity: Original Sin II: Act III reveals the Awful Truth that the Seven Gods actually created the mortal races as a power source and eat their followers' souls as soon as they arrive in the afterlife. The player characters kill their Patron Gods when they try to do the same to them.
19. Blasphemous has the Grievous Miracle, a fickle phenomenon affecting the miserable land of Cvstodia. It specializes in granting its followers' wishes... which in Cvstodia's Martyrdom Culture, often comes through the creation of Body Horror monstrosities referencing the means through which its faithful wish to be punished for no real purpose other than making them suffer. The High Wills, creators of the Miracle, made it explicitly for their own benefit, shaping Cvstodia's culture along with the Miracle to provide them with a perpetual-motion machine of prayer and pain, and the horrible fates they visited upon Laudes, who loved their prophet more than they, and the Fourth Brother, who discovered the whole charade, show that they don't practice what they preach.
20. Bayonetta has Jubileus, the Goddess who controls the realm of Paradiso and its Angels, and who drives the plot of the first game in that she is the story's Greater-Scope Villain, with the Big Bad's goal being to recover the two reality-shaping "Eyes of the World" to awaken her with the power to destroy and recreate the mortal world in her own image as a "perfect world". The second game makes her worse, by revealing that what she was doing was a power-grab; there are at least three Creator-Gods in the Bayonetta universe, one each for Paradiso, Inferno and Earth. Jubileus was hoping to steal the power of Aesir, the Creator-God of Earth, and use that to destroy every world that isn't Paradiso before recreating them as part of Paradiso, making her the only Creator-God to still exist.
21. Bastion: The gods idols only make the game harder, in fact, there is a song called "The Pantheon (Ain't Gonna Catch You)" telling how the different gods will kick you in the floor.
22. Asura's Wrath has The Golden Spider/Chakravartin. The omnipotent ruler of Gaea, he is the one responsible for the Gohma being unleashed upon Gaea and many other worlds, and makes everyone in these worlds suffer just to find his next heir. He thinks this is saintly of him, but Asura calls him out on this while punching him in the face repeatedly. The Seven Deities are a less powerful example of this. Of them, only Yasha, Deus and Augus are not outright sadistic, violent, arrogant beings who look down upon mortals and use them as they see fit, and Augus only because he cares not for domination but simply a good fight. Even Yasha and Deus was willing to be Necessarily Evil.
23. Digimon:
    1. Digimon Tamers has Zhuqiaomon, a phoenix god who is one of the four Holy Beasts that rule the Digital World. He sent his servants, the Devas, to the human world, to wreak havoc and eventually kidnap one of the heroes' friends, a small Digimon with the power to trigger evolution. However, this trope is inverted once the other Holy Beasts intervene, and explain that Zhuqiaomon was only trying to use their friend's special powers to fight the D-Reaper. Of course, Zhuqiaomon really dislikes humans as it is and isn't very apologetic to the children, so while not evil per se, he's still kind of an ass.
24. Fate/Zero:
    1. The central conflict of the story rests around priests and magi trying to gain control of the Holy Grail, which will grant their greatest wish. It turns out towards the end that the Grail has a will of its own and may do anything from twist your wish to outright refuse it. That said, the church has their doubts that this artifact is actually the Grail (according to background materials, it is not), and other works in the Nasuverse establish that the Grail has been corrupted ever since the entity Angra Mainyu was sealed in it. So, it may be a subversion.
25. Fate/Zero:
    1. Within the larger franchise, while not quite God, Gaia is the creator of the earth gods and by extension humanity, and is the manifestation of the planet itself. She also wants to knock humanity back to the Stone Age, if not outright obliterate them, for daring to rise above the natural order.
26. The Rising of the Shield Hero: In the webnovel version, the final antagonist (and the one behind most of the catastrophes in the story) is Medea, a self-proclaimed goddess that causes the waves by merging multiple worlds together, so she can drain their energy for their own use, and causes untold levels of suffering for her own entertainment, especially through fragments like Malty, the twisted sadist Naofumi and company have had to deal with for much of the saga.
27. In Ghost Rider, and thus the Marvel Universe as a whole, the evil angel Zadkiel finally succeeded in his violent coup to seize the throne of Heaven. The horrors of a Heaven run by Zadkiel are so great that many who are in the know would sooner kill themselves and take their chances in Hell.
28. Loki of The Mighty Thor is often called and self-titled the "god of evil." Other gods or godlike beings from the Marvel Universe are very much about evil including Seth and the elder god Chthon. However, the actual highest being of the Marvel Universe is almost certainly benevolent, and is usually referred to as The-One-Above-All, though it's debatable if he's ever actually been seen (though an entity that may or may not have been Him bore a striking similarity to Jack Kirby). His higher subordinates (whom all three of the above characters would be like dust mites too) have been known to drift into Lawful Neutral Jerkass Gods on occasion, though.
29. Darkseid of the New Gods is the "God of Evil" and revels in it. He runs a hellish planet dedicated to this with all his lieutenants being other evil gods.
    1. And by Final Crisis, when he's the only New God left, he gives us this little gem (as well as ample proof of statement):
       I AM THE NEW GOD.
30. Supergod: The concept of God or gods, and especially the desire for them to exist, is described as a glitch caused by human sapience, and the creation of superhumans is a modern substitute. Even the ones that could even be remotely described as benevolent such as Krishna or Jerry Craven (J.C, get it?) are Blue-and-Orange Morality at best. Krishna was created with the purpose to "save India", which he did... by massacring 90% of it's population, then rebuilding the entire country to allow the survivors to live in a technological utopia. And that's not even touching on the ones that could be described as actively malevolent such as Gajjial who destroys the world and dooms mankind because he can see alternate timelines and Krishna and J.C's utopia would be boring.
31. Wonder Woman: This has been played with over the decades, with Zeus and the other Olympians being at best Jerkass Gods.
    1. In The Legend of Wonder Woman (2016) Zeus tries to pass himself off as the Big Good in opposition to Ares as the Big Bad but Diana is proven right in her distrust when he proudly commands that she help him massacre most of humanity and subjugate the remnants, proving that even though Ares is a jerk he's not nearly as cruel or self obsessed as Zeus.
    2. In the New 52's Wonder Woman (2011), Zeus is missing and presumed dead so his children fight over his throne, the callous Apollo ends up king of Olympus before being killed and overthrown by "The First Born", who is bloodthirsty and unapologetically evil.
32. This trope is shown rather than told in The Adventures of Mark Twain through the presence of The Mysterious Stranger. Although the Stranger is explicitly Satan, he nontheless represents a malevolent God-figure as opposed to the benevolent God featured in an earlier segment. When the children meet him, he brings a civilization of clay figures to life on his planet. However, when he notices a few of the clay figures having a petty argument over property, he grows angry, and kills them all in a rage. The children are horrified, but the Mysterious Stranger doesn't show any remorse at all, since he can always make more clay people if he wishes. His musings as the children leave are especially creepy:
    The Mysterious Stranger: Life itself is only a vision. A dream. Nothing exists, save empty space and you. And you... are but a thought.
33. The Dark Eye at first glance has a "gods = good; demons = evil" divide. Apart from the Nameless God, who was a traitor to the good gods. Then you find out about some more obscure (demi)gods, particularly the bloodthirsty Kor, who is the patron of mercenaries and likes to get cut off fingers of slain foes as sacrifice. Of course the fact that some misguided people worship demons as gods doesn't mean anything. Until you get deeper into the ancient history/mythology and find out that at least some of the Archdemons that rule Hell used to be gods, and are only demons now because their number of worshippers diminished and they were supplanted by newer, more popular gods. Or they just did it For the Evulz.
    1. Plus, the gods really only care about the existence of creation. Mortals are only interesting for them for their effect on creation and for reaping their souls (every god gets the souls of mortals that live by his ideals) to strengthen the armies of creation in the last battle when the aforementioned Nameless God rips the outer sphere open, letting in the hordes of uncreated demons. Some of them seem to be curious about mortals that live by their ideals, like Phex (essentially god of tricksters) or Hesinde (goddess of wisdom and art), but that could be a ruse to get more souls. Others, the hard liners, were ready to nuke a region to stop a renegade from damning all mortals (signing their souls over to the demons), even if it meant reaping tens of thousands of souls prematurely. Luckily the largest army of mortals in the last age stopped the renegade before that.
    2. The "evil" (demi)gods are implied to be falling gods, going over to the demon side. The Nameless God didn't go over to the demons' side, he just weakened creation, letting the demons in more easily, gaining control of some of them, and taking creation for himself.
34. Practically every Dungeons & Dragons setting features evil deities, though most settings primarily have those evil deities in conflict with good deities. Some settings, on the other hand, only have evil gods. Although it's unclear if they're gods or not, the Dark Powers of Ravenloft are either out-and-out evil, or so inscrutable and/or indifferent to the innocents caught up in their playground that they might as well be.
35. Exalted: All the major gods are addicted to the Games of Divinity. What the Games are is left up to the individual ST but it is known that they are incredibly addictive, with only the original makers of the world, the Primordials, immune. Thus a common Internet meme states "The Unconquered Sun is on Celestial Crack". Then again, so are Luna, the Five Maidens, several of the head divisions, many God-Blooded (children of major gods, minor Gods don't get access) and even anyone who has seen the Games of Divinity Form of the Prismatic Arrangement of Creation Style of Sidereal Martial Arts.
36. In Magic: The Gathering, the gods that are worshipped by the people of Zendikar — Cosi, Ula, and Emeria — were actually inspired by distorted memories of Kozilek, Ulamog, and Emrakul, the three Eldrazi titans. One cleric has a crisis of faith when the truth is revealed.

    Ayli, Kamsa cleric: I believed in a beautiful god. But this is the true face of the divine.

37. Warhammer 40,000:
    1. All WH40K gods are evil. In WH40K the only really relevant gods (as in, the ones controlling the endless hordes of ravenous daemons and who have the ability to spread their "blessings" liberally upon their mortal followers as opposed to simply being a generally ineffectual focus of worship) literally embody the worst parts of sentience.
    2. Disturbingly, the Gods of Chaos also embody positive qualities:
       1. Khorne is the embodiment of rage, so both berserkers and honorable warriors fall under his purview. Trying to gain favor with him by slaughtering the defenseless is not going to get you a lot of points.
       2. Slaanesh is desire incarnate, and while hedonists are the most represented among his followers, artists and musicians can follow him as well.
       3. Nurgle is one of the few gods to be actually nice, and is a Friend to All Living Things... literally, all living things. He loves plague-causing bacteria just as much as he loves his followers, and sees infecting the latter with the former to be a good reward.
       4. Then there is Tzeentch, a God of Manipulative Bastards...who is the Warhammer universe's God of Hope.
    3. The Gods of Chaos are entities created by the Warp, which is psychically connected to the minds of sentient species throughout the universe (not all of them, but several enough). The Warhammer universe is a Crapsack World at best, outright Dystopia at worst, a place of perpetual ultraviolent warfare and every second alien race is Always Chaotic Evil- even the three "good" factions (Imperium, Eldar and Tau) are each an unhealthy mixture of Absolute Xenophobe, Manipulative Bastard, Scary Dogmatic Aliens / Humans and Moral Myopia on an intergalactic scale, all perfectly willing to eradicate entire planets and races that get in their way (or just on principle). So, essentially, this is a cosmic case of Create Your Own Villain- the reason the Gods of Chaos are evil is because they are shaped by the emotions of the peoples of the universe at large, and the universe at large is Hell. In a nicer Warhammer verse, Khorne, Tzeentch, Nurgle and Slaanesh might actually be somewhat benevolent- of course, since they arent, the universe is even worse that it normally would be, making this and its consequences a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy to boot.
    4. There is/was also Malal/Malice who is considered too dangerous even by Chaos Gods.
    5. Gork and Mork, who are slightly less bad. Slightly. Since they are Gods of Orks, it by default means strong homicidal tendencies. However, in fact they don't actually do much, save for protecting the souls of Orks in the Warp and occasionally butting heads with Chaos Gods. So from the Ork point of view, even by human standards they look almost benevolent. They're more active in Fantasy, and not nearly as nice there.
    6. The C'Tan? They're arguably not real gods (they're just hideously powerful Energy Beings with the power of gods, to whom the laws of physics aren't even guidelines), but they're active at the moment... and make the Chaos Gods look good by comparison. The Chaos Gods at least have positive traits even if they're, at the moment, almost totally overshadowed by vile evil. The C'Tan are a bunch of self-serving, duplicitous, genocidal bastards who want to wipe out all life in the galaxy because life energy tastes better than stars. Also, they reduced their entire race of worshipers into near-mindless cyborg undead robotic slaves. There are four of them left: the Nightbringer, the personification of death who burned his image into the psyche of virtually all life (big exception: the Orks) as such and made life be afraid of death; the Deceiver, Chessmaster par excellence; the Outsider, currently batshit bonkers and locked away in a cosmic prison; and the Void Dragon, currently napping. Information on the Void Dragon is sketchy, but he is said to be the most powerful C'Tan of them all, is believed to have total control over machines of all sorts, lightning, and may be the Machine God worshipped by the Adeptus Mechanicus — conveniently assumed to be sleeping under Mars.
    7. The Deceiver in particular is one of the only entities so nasty that he's evil in both Canon Warhammer 40k and the fan-made Mirror Universe Brighthammer 40k. In the latter, he's known as the Soothsayer, and specializes in telling dangerous and harmful truths, and dispelling even the most harmless or beneficial lies.
    8. The Eldar used to have a nice, normal, stable pantheon with many nice gods. Guess which ones survived the Fall? Khaine the Bloody-Handed and Cegorach the Laughing God.
    9. And Isha the god of fertility and love, who seems to be the only total aversion in the series. Of course, she's kind of busy being held prisoner and tortured by the Chaos God Nurgle, who is otherwise a rather Affably Evil god.
    10. What about the God-Emperor of Man? OK, he wasn't as bad as several of the above examples, but he regularly ordered Exterminantus of entire planets, including human planets that refused to join the Imperium on his terms or just weren't human enough, all in the name of reuniting the fragmented human empire and creating utopia. Not to mention that he also came up with the idea to wage wars of extermination against all aliens. And of course, the fact that half the Primarchs fell to Chaos in the first place can be directly traced to his complete ineptitude at seeing them as anything but tools in his conquest of the galaxy. Did we mention that a thousand humans are sacrificed to him every day to keep him alive on the Golden Throne?
        1. Funnily enough, back when the Emperor was alive/awake, he was a Flat-Earth Atheist who outlawed all worship (including worship of him). He tried to Defy this trope and tried to fight it by banning any and all forms of religion. But since the Chaos gods are made of emotion, not faith, this failed spectacularly. Thus he was put on life support on the Golden Throne, worshiped as a God against his will.
    11. The more powerful Daemon Princes reach Physical God levels, making them this trope to their enemies (though they depend on their patron god not changing their mind if they're killed).
38. While Warhammer Fantasy has the same Chaos gods, many of its other gods are much more benevolent, if a bit more subtle. They tend to act more by creating or empowering a champion to fight back chaos, most recently Voltan.
    1. Though the Fantasy version of Khaine has no redeeming qualities at all.
    2. In WHFB, the gods are not necessarily outright evil as in WH40K; they are much more subtle. Chaos deities, however, are completely immoral. Likewise, goodness does not equate niceness - The Empire professes all the decandent, fanatic, militaristic and intolerant ingredients of the historical Holy Roman Empire, while Bretonnia is a feodalistic hellhole. Even so, the world of Warhammer is a world half empty, and its deities reflect that.
    3. Even the Chaos Gods could be called misunderstood on a good day. Ever since his ascension, however, Nagash has become a god of death and has not a single ounce of goodness or morality in his undead bones.
39. The Dragonland Chronicles storyline by power metal band Dragonland details how "The Gods" pit the Armies of the Light (Humans, Elves and Dwarves) against the Hordes of the Night (Orcs, Goblins and Trolls) in a semi-apocalyptic battle once every century for entertainment; if the Light Side wins, the Hordes of the Night are driven back to whatever unholy place they crawled out of and peace endures until the next Battle of the Ivory Plains. If the Dark Side wins, Dragonland is plunged into a century of darkness and pestilence. One century after the triumph of the Dark Side, a hero emerges to defeat the Hordes of the Night decisively, ascends to the Heavens to slay The Gods who have been driven mad with power, and proceeds to become "one with the universe", achieving apotheosis and becoming the new, benevolent God of known existence.
40. The Cthulhu Mythos draws most of its horror from this trope. There is no benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient God shepherding humanity. Instead, humanity exists on a bubble of foam in an endless cosmic ocean of darkness, surrounded by predators so horrific, that their appearance alone drives their prey insane. The gods who rule this cold, hostile universe are omniscient and omnipotent. But their scale and their knowledge make them utterly alien and impersonal. The greatest of them barely notices humanity at all. As for the ones who do take an interest...
    1. The actual creator of the Universe, Azatoth, is not even sentient, and is referred to as the Blind Idiot God, and exists as a formless mass of chaos outside reality.
    2. Nyarlathotep, the "Crawling Chaos", is the closest to what humans would understand as a divine being, being possessed of sentience and personality rather than something resembling an amoral, rampaging hurricane. Unfortunately, he's more of a sadistic, malevolent Trickster God than anything else, and has some nebulous purpose for humanity.
    3. Finally, there's Yog-Sothoth, who even the Old Ones view as a God (he is also the "grandfather of Cthulhu"), and, like God's, has spawned hybrid offspring on Earth with human worshippers.
41. Dragaera: Vlad Taltos ends up discussing morality with another character, especially with regards to the behavior of the gods. He eventually decides that an evil act/action, even when done by a god, is still evil; while he does learn that they have their reasons, it doesn't mean he won't disagree with their methods. Some of the later books have him (somewhat idly) considering assassinating a particular one, especially after certain of her actions resulted in a 'peasant' rebellion/uprising, and him on the run and divorced.
42. In The Eschaton Series, there is a God-like entity called the Eschaton, which spread humanity over three thousand years of space and responds to any attempts at Time Travel by almost completely destroying the offending planet. Slightly subverted, however, because the Eschaton specifically states that it is not God. Also, the Eschaton is not evil — it acts only from self-preservation (ensuring that the timeline leading to its own creation takes place correctly), not from sadism. This doesn't stop some people in-Universe from seeing it as evil, but they tend to the villains in-story.
43. Paul Kidd's Greyhawk trilogy ends with Queen Of The Demonweb Pits, in which two characters convince the rest that all the gods are, at best, really morally dubious. It is obvious that gods like Lolth (whom they spend most of the book working on killing) are evil, supposedly good gods like Thoth are proven to be right bastards as well, since Thoth enslaves the souls of his worshipers to operate his temple, library, and farms, intentionally mind-wiping them and keeping them ignorant so they don't think of rebelling.

Character has a god complex but is not an actual god

1. One Piece:
   1. In a "not quite" case, the Straw Hat crew travels to another society in the sky and is forced to battle a lightning-flinging man identifying himself as god; his subjects even have (seemingly nonfunctional) wings! Turns out in this society "God" is just the title given to their ruler...
   2. While the aforementioned 'god' had the power level to back it up, later on the Celestial Dragons are revealed. They see themselves as living gods with an Omniscient Morality License. Thankfully they are much more punchable, if you can avoid the consequences.
2. In Sword Art Online, while he's only a "god" in the sense that he created the cybernetic world of Aincrad, Akihiko Kayaba's god complex causes him to trap ten thousand people in his world, where if they die they're dead in real life as well, just so that he could rule over a world of his own creation.
3. Of all places, this appears in Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's in the form of Z-One, the last human of the Bad Future. He somehow got divine powers and he's worshipped by Yliaster. After losing hope and his friends, Z-One sends android copies of his friends to the past to correct the past, but some of their actions made things worse and didn't bring the results he hoped for. After several failures, he decides as his final plan to destroy the entirety of Neo-Domino City to prevent the Bad Future from happening, even at the cost of thousands of lives.
4. The Doom Patrol once battled Red Jack, a sadistic and utterly psychotic Humanoid Abomination who claimed to be both the Supreme God and Jack the Ripper. Although as he/it/whatever was clearly batshit crazy neither of these were necessarily true.
5. The times when Thanos of Titan has acquired omnipotence (Heart of the Universe, Infinity Gauntlet, the Cosmic Cube) the situation is similar to this. "How can you cope with a universe where God is truly mad."
6. The Games We Play: Malkuth might not actually be omnipotent or omniscient, but he's close enough to it that there's little practical difference as far as the Huntsman on the ground is concerned... and unfortunately for all, he's a massive dick. The massive dick, in fact, being the creator of the Grimm and all.
7. The Shape of the Nightmare to Come, a Warhammer 40,000 fic, has a particularly horrifying take on the "Star Child" theory: the Astronomicon fails and the Emperor dies, causing his immensely powerful soul to go into the Warp and become the so-called Star Father, a Chaos God. Of Order. The Star Father is so ridiculously powerful that with his birth it took the combined efforts of the other four Chaos Gods just to stop him from crushing them all outright, and he has a vast army of Angyls with the ascended head of the Grey Knights, Kaldor Draigo at its head. Also, his Catchphrase: "OBEY!!"
8. Played with in The LEGO Movie: "The Man Upstairs", who is revered as a god among the Master Builders, is actually the father of Finn, the child who played with his dad's Legos against his constant instructions to leave them be so he can keep all of his Lego sets seperate. In the story that Finn weaves, he bases the villain Lord Business on his father. Thankfully, "The Man Upstairs", and by extension Lord Business, has a change of heart and decides to let Finn build whatever he likes with his Legos.
9. The eponymous Zardoz promotes violence among the Brutals giving them weapons and encourage them to kill, rape and enslave other people just to keep them under control for the sake of the Secret Circle of Secrets. He is, however, in reality The Man Behind the Curtain.
10. In Beast Machines, Megatron has pretty much become the malevolent God of Cybertron, controlling just about every aspect of existence there. Of course, the last few Maximals alive aren't going to stop until he's taken down. Towards the end, he decides to absorb all the sparks he stole, and was literally seconds away from turning Cybertron into "the perfect Technosphere" and becoming the new Primus.
11. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream features the computer "AM" with a severe God complex. Originally named the "Allied Mastercomputer", subsequently renamed "Aggressive Menace" when it developed intelligence, it killed almost the entire population of Earth. It then used its near omnipotence and omniscience to give the five surviving humans immortality, so that it may continue to physically and psychologically torture them indefinitely. Though as others have pointed out on the Fridge tab of the same work, AM isn't God, it's the other guy.

God isn't evil or is only ambiguously evil

1. Tales of the Abyss plays with this. From the way that all life in the world is bound by a prophecy that will eventually kill all life in the world created by the local Crystal Dragon Jesus, Lorelei, it seems that God is going to be the single most horrific tyrant imaginable. Turns out that's wrong. Lorelei didn't "create" this fate of destruction at all. He merely foresaw it and clued his follower, Yulia Jue, in on it because he believed that humans were special enough to Screw Destiny and save themselves from the destruction he had foreseen. Unfortunately, in what is almost certainly a dig at religious fundamentalists, it turns out that the order set up around Lorelei completely missed the point of what he was trying to do after Yulia's death: giving the impression for 2000 years that Lorelei wanted everyone to submit to the prophetic Score rather than overturn it.
2. The Legacy DLC for Dragon Age II reveals that according to the Darkspawn Emissary Corypheus, who was once a Tevinter magister, the Golden City was already the Black City when he and his fellow magisters entered it... implying that it corrupted them rather than the other way around. Which, if the Golden City/Black City is the home of the Maker, likely implies that the Maker is evil too. Considering what a Crapsack World Thedas is, that makes a disturbing amount of sense...
3. Doom Eternal: The Codex speaks of The Father, who is responsible for the creation of all life, including the Dark Lord, Davoth, who he banished to Hell and not killed out of sheer compassion for his creations. The Ancient Gods - Part Two reveals that the being known as the Father was actually a usurper. Davoth is the real Father, who was betrayed by the Maykrs, his own creations, after they had discovered the secret to immortality and sealed him and his first world Jekkad away out of fear that he would eventually end all life — and Davoth's fury would transform his people into the demons and his world into Hell. He seeks to destroy the Maykrs and creation entire as revenge for this betrayal, and was instrumental in the creation of the Doom Slayer himself. Though Word of God implies Davoth may also just be lying about all this.
4. In The Binding of Isaac, God orders Isaac's mom to take away all of Isaac's possessions, clothes included, and lock him in his room. He then orders Isaac's mom to kill Isaac. Finally, God kills Isaac's mom and frees Isaac. Given the game is a Whole-Plot Reference to Genesis chapter 22, the subversion is rather fitting if a bit obvious.
   1. There are hints that the voice ordering Isaac's mother to abuse him is actually Satan in disguise, furthering the subversion.
5. In Ted Chiang's story "Hell Is the Absence of God", God isn't evil so much as operating on Blue-and-Orange Morality. His angels dispense curses and blessings without apparent rhyme or reason or for that matter any apparent awareness that their passage through the terrestrial plane causes such things and He sends a person to Hell (which actually isn't such a bad place for most of its inhabitants) after guaranteeing that person will love Him unconditionally and want nothing more than to be in His presence.
6. There was an arc of The Spectre that featured God apparently going completely insane and cannibalizing the Archangel Michael in a scene right out of Francisco de Goya's painting Saturn Devouring His Son. However, it's eventually revealed that a). God Is Good, b). Michael was in on it, and c). the entire thing was a Secret Test of Character for the Spectre.
7. God on Trial: Subverted. The Jews were not discussing God's character - such banter was irrelevant to the trial, and stripped from the record. The jury ultimately decides God is in breach of contract, although whether they find him evil is not stated. The final monologue, however, features a man who is unequivocally of this position.
8. Dewey in Malcolm in the Middle suggests that God is merely indifferent instead of outright evil. He even suggests that people should enjoy themselves and stop fighting over trivial things such as religion, since it hardly matters when God can simply whip out a magnifying glass at anytime?!
9. Creation is also used as a prison for evil gods in Monte Cook's d20 setting Ptolus. At least there, the Chaos Gods are also sealed away in a pocket dimension contained within our larger universe, thus making mankind not involuntary fellow inmates but instead involuntary prison guards.
10. Franchise/Yu-Gi-Oh has a weird example based vaguely off Gnotism. In the World of Duel Terminal a being known as Sophia repeatedly resets the universe via the Vylons and until Sombre Lapis and Kerykion stopped her. But as it turns out she was actually doing this to stop Tierra from blowing up the word, so it's more or less [1]
11. In Sinfest, subverted; God can seem this way to some of the characters, but is generally just obnoxious and somewhat childish, with occasional Pet the Dog moments. Even these are decreasing with the Lighter and Softer touch — most appearances now feature him playing catch with Jesus.
    1. Jesus, on the other hand, is an awesome guy.
    2. So is the Buddha. The Dragon of Eastern Religion is generally awesome also.
    3. One point against Sinfest's God, however, is the way the classic Problem of Evil is eventually resolved... turns out, God CREATED The Devil, and made him do what he does. Presumably just to make himself look good by comparison. When The Devil finds out, he outright quits and goes on a tropical vacation... only to then apparently forget all about it and come back, continuing where he left off. As such, all of The Devil's (unquestionably evil) deeds can be laid squarely at God's feet in this universe... or, at least, at his hand..
12. The titular Water Phoenix King, Yamra, and his predecessor Gurahl, though this was, and to some extent still is, a contested belief in the story. Those who benefitted under his rule consider him to have been a benevolent deity, and the opposition to be immoral for rebelling against the Natural Order of the Universe; the rebellion considered him an awful tyrant, and the order that Gurahl imposed on the universe a harmful thing — as did Lady Luck, who killed Gurahl over his binding the sun-goddess Okidesha. "Pure" Yamrans seek to restore the strict caste system, with Hadrakahn priests and knights at the top of the heap, everyone else working for them, and witches and sorcerers cast into the outer darkness...for the Good Of All, of course!
13. The Goddamned features Cain as the main character, who espouses this trope at every opportunity, having been cursed with Complete Immortality for his crime, unable to die from even the most horrific injuries, as his body simply regrows (he mentions having jumped into a volcano at one point). Earth is little more than a wasteland, with every human shown having been reduced to cannibalistic savagery, and a massive army led by Noah pillaging what little is left, claiming to be under divine orders to construct a great Ark for the coming deluge that will drown the Earth and all it's sin, enslaving anyone they don't murder as laborers. the series ends with the Morality Pet being murdered by her own son, who has been driven insane by his suffering, Cain killing Noah, and the Ark being burned as the slaves revolt. Cain walks away as it begins to rain...
    1. The second series centers around the origin of the Nephilim, with a Lady Land cult raising young girls to become pure brides of God (those who are not chosen are trained as warriors to protect the mountain they live on). Two friends begin to question their society just as they start to reach maturity... The girls are actually stolen as babies from wild tribes of humans living beneath the mountain. The girls chosen as brides are whisked away from a mountaintop into the heavens where...something is implied to rape them. They're returned to earth pregnant, and give birth to horrifically malformed giants, crossbreeds of the mortal and divine, with most of them dying in childbirth.
14. Game of Thrones: Davos accuses the Lord of Light of being evil when he lashes out at Melisandre. Assuming that her acts (including human sacrifices) are something that the Lord approves of, he may be right. Eventually downplayed when the Lord of Light plays a pivotal part in preventing the world from ending, although Davos states they can still only speculate about what this god really wants.
15. "God's Song (That's Why I Love Mankind)" by Randy Newman has several verses sung from God's perspective which show him to be quite cruel toward humans. As is typical with Newman songs though, it's not entirely clear how serious he's being (since Newman is a "devout atheist" it's possibly serious). God in the song seemingly despises humanity ("I recoil in horror from the foulness of thee/From the squalor and the filth and the misery"), and likes that living in these conditions makes people turn to him.
    I burn down your cities-how blind you must be
    I take from you your children and you say how blessed are we
    You all must be crazy to put your faith in me
    That's why I love mankind
    You really need me
    That's why I love mankind
16. God in White Wolf's Demon: The Fallen is made out to be a psychotically ungrateful megalomaniac. Then again, the entire point of that RPG is that Lucifer is a sympathetic protagonist. What the Demons say about God in that game comes from an obviously biased source. God's actual intentions and motivations are far more ambiguous in the game as a whole; the whole Reconciler faction of Demons believes that God must have been good after all, mysterious as His ways may seem... and Lucifer himself expresses doubts about his rebellion and a desperate desire to be reconciled with God at the end of the Time of Judgment game fiction.
    1. Its successor game, Demon: The Descent muddies the waters a good deal with the God-Machine. The only things known for certain about it are that it possesses godlike power, creates angels to serve it, and that it's not so much malicious as apathetic; for all its power, it's still a computer, and sees everything as inputs and outputs. Yes, it might drive someone to suicide for some occult algorithm or protect a mass-murderer, but these are just side-effects for its real, inscrutable goals.
17. In Desperation, God is not exactly evil, but very cruel. He sends David Carver, an eleven-year-old boy against the Big Bad; his family is killed one by one; when he wishes to die, and the Big Bad needs to be defeated with a suicidal mission, God sends somebody else, who says to David:

    "You said 'God is cruel' the way a person who's lived his whole life on Tahiti might say 'Snow is cold.' You knew, but you didn't understand. Do you know how cruel your God can be, David? How fantastically cruel? Sometimes he makes us live."

Other

1. Uniquely subverted in Known Space with the Kzinti, in that radical heretics among them had come to believe that God is exactly what the human race believes Him to be ... and hence, is on our side, rather than theirs, in the Man/Kzin Wars. Their "religion" consists of wearing masks of human skin and aping human prayers, in hopes that the Kzin-hating Deity will mistake them for humans and hence show them mercy.
2. In La Passe Miroir, the character called "Dieu" (God in French) turns out to be a powerful entity manipulating the political systems of the world to create an illusion of peace while keeping most of the world population under is control without their knowledge. Subverted: this "Dieu" is only a sentient reflection of another character, Eulalie Dilleux, whose last name is mispronounced "Dieu". This entity's power come from its nature as a reflection, as he can take the face and powers of anyone he met. Its "true" name is l'Autre (the Other). It is evil only because his concept of peace is far from perfect.
3. Fate/Zero:
   1. Played with a curious case with Ryuunosuke. He believes that God loves good and evil, therefore he thinks that God loves his mass-murdering. In his eyes, why else would God allow crimes and wars to keep happening and make blood and guts so pretty?
4. In "The Midnight Meat Train", it's implied that the Eldritch Abomination that leads the race of immortal cannibals who secretly rule New York from hidden tunnels underneath it, or others of its kind, are the original inspiration for all myths of Gods throughout human history.
   • I don't know what this is, but it's not God Is Evil. Not sure if it can even be considered God Guise.