Kill the God

Deicide, aka killing a god.

To kill the gods, or even God (or a Crystal Dragon Jesus Expy) Himself, is a daunting task. You're often dealing with an Immortal, Nigh Invulnerable, Physical God that can probably snuff the light out of you in an instant.

But that doesn't sit well with how deities are portrayed in stories, where they have a tendency to die, as mythology often shows. As a result, you may have a setting where you can Kill The Gods. This makes sense if the character who kills the god is its equal or greater in power, although it's not unheard of to see someone who's weaker than the god kill them anyway.

If the Gods Need Prayer Badly, this could be accomplished by everybody ceasing worship at once and letting the god just shrivel up.

Of course, once you do this, God Is Dead. See also Rage Against the Heavens. Compare Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?, which might be their cause of death.

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Examples of Kill the God include:

Anime & Manga

• Almost happens to Haruhi at the hands of Kuyo and Fujiwara at the climax of The Astonishment of Haruhi Suzumiya Vol. 2. More exactly: they bind an unconscious Haruhi to a floating cross placed several meters above the ground, and then Fujiwara orders Kuyo to drop her to the ground. If not for Kyon getting there and pulling a Big Damn Heroes, she would have died.
• Bleach gets this pretty easily, considering the Soul Reapers are considered Death Gods by their own submission. Aizen, on the other hand, was so ridiculously powerful and ranting about his godhood that the final set of chapters leading to his defeat is actually called Deicide.
  • This turns out to be the goal of Yhwach aka the last arc's Big Bad and Emperor of the Vandenreich, who seeks to kill the Soul King and therefore destroy all the Kingdoms in existence.
• In Princess Mononoke, Lady Eboshi kills the forest spirit, which is a sort of Physical God. The results, however, aren't quite what she intended.
• An extremely difficult proposition in Saint Seiya, as the gods (with the exception of Eris in the first OVA) are really powerful, but possible with the right means. The real problem is getting them to STAY dead: Poseidon apparently died millennia before the series, but still managed to operate as a spirit and by Grand Theft Me.
• A variation occurs in Code Geass. Emperor Charles and his brother, V.V., having lost their parents to the machinations of their Deadly Decadent Court, promised each other as children that if there was a god that made people fight and scheme against each other for power, they would kill him. By the time they are older and in a position to put their plan into action, their understanding of the situation has sufficiently evolved that they're no longer trying to kill the "god" they have discovered, but they are planning to use it to enact an Assimilation Plot where all human consciousness, past and present, will unite so the fighting will stop and the dead will return.

Comics

• It happens in Preacher (Comic Book). The Saint of Killers REALLY lived up to his name.
• In Thorgal, Ogotai gets shot in the back with his own plasma gun. He wasn't a real god, just a dangerously delusional and terribly powerful alien psychic, but from the characters' power level, he certainly counts. And he did have a Mayincatec civilization doing mass human sacrifices for him.
• One of the enemies of the Marvel Comics version of Thor, Desak the God Slayer, wants to kill every god in the universe because of the actions of his home planet's Jerkass Gods. He was succeeded by the more well-known Gorr the God Butcher but the two are unrelated beyond their mutual goal.
• Darkseid sees other gods besides his New God underlings as threats to his conquest of everything, so he kills them and takes their powers.
• The title character of Harry Kipling (Deceased) does this on a regular basis. He can do it because he's technically a god himself.

Fan Fiction

• In the DC Extended Universe/Marvel Cinematic Universe crossover Avenger Goddess, this is Heracles' ultimate goal. He initially thought to limit it only to the Olympian pantheon as revenge for what Hera did to him only to discover, when he's released from his prison, that Ares already killed the Olympians. He then turns his sights on Thor hoping to kill the God of Thunder and claim his mastery over storms to break past Zeus' defences around Olympus and claim the resources to kill every god in the universe.

Films — Animation

• In Hercules, Hades attempts to kill Hercules (who, in the movie, is a fellow God rather than the demi-God he is in Greek myths) by forcing him to drink poison that will turn him mortal when he was a baby. Thanks to the timely arrival of Alcmene and Amphytrion, Herc's soon to be Muggle Foster Parents, Herc ends up drinking all but the last drop - so he keeps one aspect of his immortality.

Films — Live-Action

• Star Trek V: The Final Frontier has earned the Fan Nickname Star Trek: Shoot God in the Face since its climax involves going to the heart of the galaxy and meeting an Omnipotent, godlike being in need of a starship, and then shooting it in the face.
• In the 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans, various rulers are trying to do this to the Olympians by destroying their temples and denying them worship. While it does weaken them, the gods are still powerful enough to inflict misery on the commonfolk, whose suffering their arrogant rulers ignore. It also doesn't do anything to weaken Hades, since he draws power from their fear of death. In the 2012 sequel, the Olympians have lost enough power that they've begun fading away, dying permanent deaths.
• The climax of Dogma involves the protagonist finding and killing God, in order to allow Her to respawn at the place She needs to be to stop the villain from destroying the universe.
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the Guardians kill Ego, a Celestial, a species who creates galaxies single-handedly. Though Ego makes a point to flag that he's a "small g" god.
  • The crux of Eternals is the debate to do this. Though the Eternals initially try to Take a Third Option and save both the Celestial Tiamut and Earth (the egg that Tiamut is gestating in), a time crunch forces them to kill Tiamut to save the planet.
  • In Thor: Love and Thunder, Gorr the God Butcher's ultimate goal is to accomplish this on a universal scale. Using the Necrosword, he killed his own god, Rapu, and a litany of others across the galaxy so he can get to Thor and use Stormbreaker to access Eternity and wish away the gods. Thor convinces Gorr to instead wish his daughter back to life.
• Avatar speaks of Earth's environmental pollution this way, saying how Gaea/Gaia is dead. And the humans' polluting of Pandora is doing the same to Eywa.

Literature

• In His Dark Materials, this is Asriel's mission. There's also a knife which is properly called the god-destroyer.
• In Percy Jackson & the Olympians, Pan is killed because of a lack of people who believe in him, which also doubled as a Green Aesop. In the Sequel Series, The Heroes of Olympus, Gaea attempts to do this to whole Olympian pantheon by destroying the physical Mount Olympus.
• Belgarion of Riva has "Godslayer" as one of his official titles, and it isn't honorary.
• Also by Eddings, Sparhawk killed a god at the end of both The Elenium and The Tamuli. The gods were even aware this was a danger because Sparhawk was born Immune to Fate.
• In Everworld gods can't be killed by mortal means, but they can be killed by other gods or godly weapons. Or modern weapons from our world. There's also the Eldritch Abomination Ka Anor, an alien god who eats other gods and is basically trying to genocide the whole holy race.
• In Hogfather, a Discworld novel, the plot is driven by an attempt to assassinate the Santa Claus Expy, the Hogfather, by using magic to keep children from believing in him. At one point the protagonist stops to consider that the Hogfather really is a god when you get down to it, and indeed, the story explains that he's basically the modern incarnation of an old solstice deity.
• Several gods are slain using the eponymous items in the Book of Swords series by Fred Saberhagen. In fact, once humans realize gods are not immortal, they start not believing in them, and the rest die from disbelief.
• The goal of Nicolae Carpathia's Global Community One World Unity Army at the battle of Armageddon in the Left Behind book Glorious Appearing, and also that of The Other Light at the end of the Millennium Kingdom in Kingdom Come — neither of which was achieved as God and Jesus wiped out both armies.

Live-Action TV

• In Xena: Warrior Princess, the title character gains the Power to Kill Gods in the season 5 finale, and uses it so often that she is actually billed as "Xena of Amphipolis, the Warrior Princess, Slayer of Gods and Defender of the Elijans."
  • On the Hercules and Xena Wiki, there's a category on the trope "Power to kill Gods".
• The entire fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer revolves around killing Glory, a seemingly unstoppable hellgod trapped in a mortal body.
• Star Trek:
  • Klingons have no gods, because they killed them centuries ago. Apparently they were "more trouble than they were worth." Other retellings of the myths say that the Klingon equivalent of Adam and Eve killed the gods after being wed. Though some Federation historians, jaded by centuries' worth of Sufficiently Advanced Alien across the galaxy, suspect that most Klingon myths about this are distortions of when the early Klingons forced the invading Hur'q to abandon their conquest of the Klingon homeworld of Qo'noS.
  • In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Who Mourns for Adonais", an alien claiming to be the Greek god Apollo captures the Enterprise. They destroy the source of his powers and he "spreads himself upon the winds" to join his fellow gods that had passed on.
• In Stargate SG-1, a device is created that is capable of killing ascended beings. In the Ori galaxy, the Ori themselves are ascended beings who have become, quite literally, gods. The device is sent through a stargate to the Ori galaxy, where it goes off, destroying all of the Ori.
• In season five of Supernatural, Lucifer wipes out a hotelful of gods from other religions in about five minutes. Death also claims he will reap God at the end of time.

Music

• The third act of Fireaxe's epic four hour metal album Food for the Gods centers around Satan leading an army of demons and damned in a full-on assault of Heaven with this goal. And it works! Sort of.

Mythology and Religion

• Older Than Dirt: In Egyptian Mythology, Set chopped up his brother Osiris and threw all the pieces into the Nile.
• Balder in Norse Mythology. Killed by an arrow (or spear) through the heart shot by Hodr, but he was set up by Loki. He knew Balder's only weakness: mistletoe.
  • In Gesta Danorum's version, Baldr dies via a sword called mistletoe.
  • At Ragnarok, Odin, Thor, Loki, Heimdall, Frey, and most of the Aesir bite it at the hands of giants, trolls, Fenrir, Jormungandr, and Surtr.

Tabletop Games

• Exalted is full of exaggeration, and this trope is no exception. You can trivially kill the vast majority of gods right out of chargen. And not only you can kill typical day-to-day house-spirit gods, you can also kill the Incarnae, who are the big bosses of the gods. And ultimately you can kill the Primordials, who are the gods of the gods. In fact, that last one was the very reason why the Exalted were created.
• For an RPG based on Gnosticism, this trope is Averted in Kult. But only because God Is Dead.
• Dungeons and Dragons:
  • 1st Edition
    • Under the rules (Deities and Demigods Cyclopedia) it was possible to kill deities, which led to bizarre results. One example was a letter to Dragon magazine in which a PC killed the Norse Mythology god Thor by pushing him off the top of a wall and getting Thor's magical hammer Mjolnir as booty.
    • Module Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits. A high level PC group could could kill Lolth, the Demon Queen of Spiders, who was a lesser deity under the rules. If they did so her spider ship would cease to exist, but they would be saved and returned to the Prime Material Plane by their deities.
  • 2nd Edition
    • Legends and Lore supplement. Deities could only be killed by a more powerful deity or any deity using an artifact. Mortals could never kill a deity. Deities sometimes created avatars (lesser versions of themselves) to act on the Prime Material Plane. Avatars could be destroyed by mortals.
  • Killing gods were a fairly trivial task (although it's rarely easy) in 3.5e. 4E has a few deities statted up (Bahamut, Tiamat, Torog, Lolth at least), and usually require you meet some special condition to permanently beat them down (either affecting them in some way that violates their portfolio, using something against their iconic material, or getting a bunch of Primordials/Demon Lords and having them gang up on them).

Video Games

• In The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind, you can kill up to three Gods, with two being required to finish the story. They are Vivec, Almalexia in Tribunal (necessary to finish Tribunal's story), and Dagoth Ur (necessary to finish the main game's story).
  • Killing Mehrunes Dagon in Oblivion is supposed to be impossible (he's got something like 10,000 HP and can stomp you to death without half-trying), but can be done if you A) abuse the Alchemy and Enchant skills to make a Game Breaking enchanted weapon, or B) get lucky with Wabbajack.
  • The endgame of Skyrim subverts this. Alduin is literally unkillable. The best you can do is knock him back into the timestream, putting off The End of the World as We Know It.
• God of War, of course. Kratos goes on a killing spree in Olympus as well as many other legends from Greek Mythology. Of course, killing the gods that govern the elements or the guy that guards the souls of the dead may have small inconveniences, but hey, no plan is perfect!
• The ending of the first and third Silent Hill games.
• One of the branching paths in Guardian Heroes allows you to storm the gates of Heaven and kill God.
• The Shin Megami Tensei series has this alongside Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?, what with being able to fuse gods like Pallas Athena, Vishnu, or Amaterasu and getting them to fight other demons based on deities.
  • Shin Megami Tensei II ends with the protagonist slaying YHVH, an egotistical caricature of the Judeo-Christian God. He pays dearly for this after YHVH comes back.
  • Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne has the protagonist defeat Kagutsuchi, a mere avatar of YHVH. However, by completing the secret True Demon ending, he ultimately becomes the general of a demonic army aiming to take down YHVH once and for all.
  • The Persona series continues this trend, with the main characters fighting Nyarlathotep, Nyx, and Izanami. Of course, it takes two whole games to banish Nyarlathotep, you don't kill Nyx so much as seal her away, and Izanami seems rather pleased to have been defeated.
• Arc Rise Fantasia has the main characters kill the god of their world. Unlike the other examples however, God is most definitely NOT evil, but saving the world means that either they kill her, or she just disappears.
• One ending in Yggdra Union has the eponymous character head to heaven to do just that.
• Sacrifice sees the five gods of the world dropping like flies as the story goes on: Eldred kills at least two in every campaign, and Marduk inevitably kills the rest. It's explained to you that the gods you killed may return with a new name later as long as there are people to believe in the forces they represent, but the process takes centuries at best.
• Pretty much the entire point of Kid Icarus is to go from a weakling cherub to badass so you can kill the goddess of darkness and save the goddesses of light. No wonder it's Nintendo Hard.
• Asura's Wrath has this as well. The Seven Deities started out as Sufficiently Advanced Cyborgs as part of a species known as "demigods" who decided to elevate themselves to full-on godhood by assassinating the emperor and pinning the murder on Asura, then kidnapping his daughter because of her unique ability at controlling Mantra, their power source. Asura is betrayed, his wife is murdered, and he is killed. He comes back, and he is pissed.
  • Elevated to really ridiculous levels with Asura killing Chakravartin, a being that's not only the source of Mantra, and the embodiment of the Wheel of life and Samsara, but also is hinted to have created the Universe!
• Final Fantasy VI has this, as well. The playable characters' kill the three gods of magic; Goddess, Demon and Fiend, in order to bereave Kefka of his magical powers. However, it turns out after the Warring Triad had been felled that Kefka had drained them of so much of their powers, he was sustaining magic by himself, making him the God of magic.
  • And then the playable characters proceed to kill him.
  • Later, in Final Fantasy VIII, if you have Odin on your side when you fight Seifer, he up and kills the poor guy right at the get-go. Fortunately, Gilgamesh shows up to finish him off, taking up Odin's sword.
• Record of Agarest War 2 has Weiss, the first generation protagonist who kills a god and now must pay the price. Although he didn't get to actually kill Chaos because the real Weiss has been Dead All Along.
• The Sinistrals in the Lufia series claim to be gods, and they've got the power to back up that claim. They're also embodiments of evil, so the plot of the games usually revolves around finding the Dual Blade, a sword which can kill gods, and then kicking the Sinistrals' asses with it.
• In Dungeon Crawl, Gods Need Prayer Badly. Gods without intelligent followers will fade away. This makes it possible to kill Jiyva, the god of slime, by killing Royal Jelly, the only slime intelligent enough to worship. The other gods have enough followers to not be susceptible to this.
• In Dark Souls, you end up killing all of the deities mentioned in the opening cutscene. Granted, most of them are in pretty bad shape by the time you actually meet them. A few of the other bosses are minor gods as well, but they can be killed like any other enemy in the game.
• Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer gives you the opportunity to finish off Myrkul with the Spirit-Eater curse. This is also Death by Irony.
• Overlapping with Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?, this is the entire reason the Grey Wardens were created in the Dragon Age 'verse: the archdemons are the slumbering gods of the Tevinter Imperium, awoken by darkspawn. If killed by a normal mortal, they'll come back to life via body surfing to the nearest darkspawn. If a Grey Warden is in proximity, however, it'll jump to the Warden and their souls will mutually annihilate.
• The second half of the plot of Star Ocean Till the End of Time deals with the party trying to stop The Creator from destroying the galaxy. Subverted in that he's actually a computer programmer, but he's still the closest thing to a god that the Star Ocean universe has
• Part of the Lady of Pain's backstory is that she once fought the god of portals for control of Sigil and won by killing him. He was not a minor god, either. She then killed everyone who worshipped him and destroyed all written lore about him, leaving only one priest alive (perhaps as a reminder) and killing anyone who thereafter joined him.
• In Transformers: War for Cybertron, Megatron does this by accident. Viewing Dark Energon only as an enhanced synthetic form of regular energon, Megatron pumped it into Cybertron's core. Dark Energon was actually the lifeblood of Unicron and Megatron shoved a space station's worth of it into Primus, the creator of the Cybertronian race. Primus doesn't die but he is forced to go into emergency stasis to heal.
• The final boss battle of Nights: Journey of Dreams ends with NiGHTS killing Wizeman, the god of all Nightmares and NiGHTS' creator.
• The Fire Emblem franchise loves this trope:
  • The final battle of Fire Emblem Gaiden and its remake Echoes: Shadows of Valentia sees the heroes Alm and Celica striking down the dragon god Duma. Doubles as a Mercy Kill, as the pair find out that both Duma and his sister god Mila have started to degenerate.
  • Radiant Dawn finishes with Ike and his group slaying the Knight Templar Goddess Ashera. Then it's subverted: if the player completed a VERY... complex sidequest, it's seen that she eventually returned - as her original self, the Creator Goddess Ashunera
  • The end of the Crimson Flower and Silver Snow routes in Fire Emblem: Three Houses have the player's army killing Lady Rhea aka the heroine Seiros The Immaculate One for a different reason in each route:
    • In Crimson Flower, Byleth sided with Edelgard when she declared war on the Church of Seiros, and the desperate Rhea has become angry and vengeful. The final chapter sees her set fire to Fhirdiad after Edelgard gives her one last chance to surrender, leading to her and Byleth ending Rhea's life.
    • In Silver Snow, Rhea begins to degenerate and go berserk due to five years in captivity plus the serious injuries she received protecting Byleth when Thales tried to collapse all of Shambala on them. Unless Byleth has A support with Rhea and marries her, the only way to save her is to kill her.
    • In the backstory for all routes, it's revealed that Seiros's mother was none other than the Goddess of Fódlan, who was slain in her sleep by Those Who Slither in the Dark and the bandit Nemesis. Then, her corpse and those of also slain non-Seiros children and descendants (the Nabateans) were made into uber-powerful weapons known as the Heroes' Relics. In the present, Byleth's Mysterious Waif companion Sothis turns out to be the Conscience of the Goddess...
  • Fire Emblem Awakening has Grima, the dragon god of destruction, as its final boss. The player can either let Chrom deal the final blow or do it themselves, causing the player avatar Robin to disappear as Grima is a part of them. Luckily, if the latter is chosen, Robin can eventually return. Further subverted in that Grima is NOT exactly a God, but an Ultimate Lifeform created by Forneus, a sort-of Mad Scientist whose story is revealed in FE: Echoes's post-game stages.
  • The ending of the Revelation path in Fire Emblem Fates has the player character Corrin and both the royal families put an end to the true Big Bad and the cause of Nohr's war with Hoshido: Anankos, the crazed dragon god. DLC reveals that this is also a Mercy Kill, as Anankos was once kind and good before he began to go crazy.

Web Comics

• Attempted twice in Bob and George with the Author, who is essentially the God of the comic's universe. At the end of the first game storyline Dr Wily captures and seemingly kills the Author, erasing the comic from existence. It was quickly established the Author was only injured and recovered (at the time this was done because the Mega Man strips were meant to be filler and the Author did intend to stop them, but then wound up going back to them and they became the main story).
  • In the final storyline, Bob attempts the same plan but takes it Up to Eleven by arranging for the Author to get killed in three time periods, ensuring his destruction. When George points out that Wily already tried killing the Author and failed, the Shadowy Author reminds him that since it's already known the comic is coming to an end there's no guarantee Bob's plan will fail this time (it does, but the point is still valid).
• In Penny Arcade Tycho recommends killing the gods of Gabe's ludicrously powerful Dungeons and Dragons group in an attempt to find something to frighten them. Unfortunately...

Gabe: They killed their gods. Tycho: Why would they do that? Gabe: To ingest their godseeds.

• A major plot point in Digger, though it doesn't come up until late into the comic's run. Interestingly, it's actually a Mercy Kill; the god in question is not the Big Bad, but its victim and host.
• Sluggy Freelance: The talking sword Chaz can kill just about anything when powered by innocent blood. It claims it could easily kill the Demon King, a God of Evil. We don't get to see this happen, but less direct contact with Chaz does scar the Demon King.

Web Original

• This article from The Onion: Nasa Completes 52-Year Mission to Find, Kill God.
• Tales of MU gives us Gillian "Gottmorder" Callahan.

Imperial Agent: The charges against you include three counts of attempted deicide... Callahan: One of those succeeded. Imperial Agent: We don't have a law that covers successful deicide.

• Perhaps the ultimate example would be The Salvation War series. The first story has humanity go to war with Hell and win so hard that it is later referred to as the Curbstomp War. Then we kill Satan with cruise missiles. The next story, we go to war with Heaven. The only reason that we don't personally kill God there... well... someone beat us to it.
• In the SCP Foundation universe, the Global Occult Coalition (an organization devoted to destroying the supernatural) traces its origin, in part, from a group of German occultists that supposedly killed the biblical God. (The article's more of a Feghoot actually.)
• From Atop the Fourth Wall, Linkara is against the entity which is Missingno, whom is described as an elder God. Linkara acknowledges that conventional combat does not work and only by using a Hannibal Lecture is he able to defeat the entity.

Western Animation

• Admiral Zhao in Avatar: The Last Airbender' declares his ultimate goal to be the death of the Moon Spirit. He does succeed in this, but the Moon Spirit is quickly replaced/resurrected.
• In some Transformers continuities, planet Cybertron is rendered all but uninhabitable because of the war between the Autobots and Decepticons. Keep in mind that Cybertron is actually their god Primus in disguise. A more benevolent example across Transformers is when the Matrix of Leadership is used to destroy Unicron.
• In the American Dad! Christmas Episode "The Most Adequate Christmas Ever", Stan is ready to do this to get his second chance. God eventually talks him out of it by pointing out that holding a gun to God's head proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Stan is a Control Freak.
• Rick and Morty:
  • In "Childrick of Mort", Morty and Summer drive a spaceship through the head of Reggie, "a Zeus", and kill him instantly.
  • At the start of "Mortyplicity", a decoy Rick and Morty announce that their plan for the day is killing the Christian God. They're killed before they can follow through on it. Throughout the episode, the decoys want to kill the decoys who made them, so they aren't terminated, all the way up to the original Rick, the closest thing they have to a god.
• In The Owl House, the Boiling Isles is formed from the corpse of an ancient magical being known as a Titan, a race who possessed more magical power than anything else on the planet. "Edge of the World" introduces the Titan Trappers, mortals who hunt down and slay Titans.
• In Krapopolis, the goddess Hestia uses the Brotos flower that negates godly power in latest retreat hosting a party where god and man are equal. However her human servant turns against her, and rallies the humans to kill most of the gods and goddesses at the retreat to start the Age of Man. A giant crossbow weapon lacquered in the Brotos flower is pointed at Mt. Olympus with the intent of depowering the gods, so that the humans can invade it, but the plot if thwarted by the main protagonist Tyrannis.