Really, the only surprising thing was that it didn't happen sooner.
Pit: But you would never abuse your power, right?
Palutena: Of course I would! That's part of the goddess job description.
Palutena: Of course I would! That's part of the goddess job description.
These gods aren't lazy, but you really wish they were.
Perhaps they view all of life as a cosmic game, with humans as mere pawns and tools. Perhaps they're hungry for worship, either out of necessity or just out of a huge ego, and are willing to resort to manipulation and worse to get it. Maybe they're just keen on Disproportionate Retribution (a very common trait in religions throughout history). Maybe it's the age-old adage "power corrupts", or maybe they're just overgrown immortal children with supernatural powers or outright sociopaths, but whatever the case, the gods are just jerks. They view human life as a source of entertainment or an inconvenience.
Being Older Than Dirt, this trope's Ur-Example might be Ishtar, Sumerian goddess of getting laid and ultraviolence. As might be expected from someone of that description, she took exception to being spurned by the hero Gilgamesh and summoned a heavenly bull to go on a rampage through his city, and if her father denied her that bull, she would have caused a Zombie Apocalypse. It did not help that as he turned her down, he listed all her exes and how she arranged their terrible deaths.
Compare and contrast Abusive Precursors, and for cases where Jerkass doesn't really cover it, God of Evil, and God Is Evil; or, for a milder version, consider God Is Flawed. Often worshiped by the Corrupt Church and/or the Religion of Evil. Related to God and Satan Are Both Jerks as well as World of Jerkass. Anyone playing Religious Russian Roulette with a Jerkass God probably won't like how it ends. In video games, where you are the god, see Cruel Player-Character God. For the inversion, see God Is Good.
In real-life mythoi, this trope is often a product of Values Dissonance, as whatever the gods do in their stories was often considered okay in the time period where the stories were written, but not in the present, because society and its values change over time. Gods and the stories surrounding gods also reflect often the cultures and societies that worshipped them, and since civilizations of ancient times or societies of other nations have different values and codes of ethics than the ones we have, then a god who is considered a Jerkass God by one civilization and time period may be viewed as a heroic god instead by another. Also, having different people write and tell different stories and myths means that the deities in question are very prone to Alternate Character Interpretation by whoever is writing the story, and naturally some of these authors and storytellers also made some gods grab the Jerkass Ball from time to time. Because of that, mythological characterization and continuity regarding the gods and other mythical figures tends to fluctuate wildly from story to story.
It's also worthy to mention that this trope was actually noted and commented upon even in Antiquity. As Greek philosophy evolved past conventional conceptions about the divine, it became usual for philosophers to criticize poets, authors and worshippers for ascribing human vices and quarrels to the gods, especially given that even back then, people liked to project themselves and their opinions onto characters, even if the characters were deities or heroes. Seneca famously snarked that maybe by portraying gods as flawed and callous, people felt better about themselves. This didn't prevent some myths from spreading out among public opinion and turning some deities from being viewed as nice to being seen as evil due to people remembering them more for the bad things they did rather than for their heroic actions (the Everybody Hates Hades trope is a good example of that).
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Audio Plays
- Saint Beast: Zeus overthrew the old jerkass god and slept with his wife, then proceeded to become increasingly tyrannical — ordering his angels to kill any beings on Earth who don't acknowledge him, yearly purging angels for minor offences under the guise of honouring them, and eventually ordering Pandora to unleash a box of evil on Earth, imprisoning the Saint Beasts when they try to stop him, raping Judas, brainwashing Goh, Gai, Rey, and Shin after they get free to turn on their friends and banishing Judas and his own son (by aforementioned goddess), Luca, to hell, and sealing the other four in stone once they overcome the brainwashing. Then he retires out of annoyance.
Films — Animated
- Xibalba from The Book of Life, ends up nearly ruining the life of Manolo and indirectly destroying San Angel because he wants to get back in his wife's good graces. Subverted at the end of the film. Learning to be a better person is what actually does the trick.
- Fantasia:
- Zeus, in the Pastoral Symphony, disrupts Bacchus' party with a storm and deliberately threw lightning bolts at them. It's even worse if one goes by the myths, in which Bacchus is Zeus' son.
- Chernabog incinerates or crushes his demonic minions simply for a moment's amusement.
- The Moon King from Kubo and the Two Strings possesses power over the Heavens and claims dominion over the "Hell" that is the Earth. While he claims that he simply wants Kubo to live him in the Heavens for an eternity without hate or heartache or death, he really wants to take his other eye (having stolen one of them when he was just a baby) to take away his humanity and make him "cold, and hard, and perfect." He seems to see family less like people to treasure and more like objects in his collection, neither mourning nor really caring that all three of his daughters are now dead.
- The Sisters are Kubo's two aunts, Sariatu's sisters and daughters of the Moon King. Both share their father's contempt of mankind and seek to take Kubo's eye on their father's orders. They both see Sariatu falling in love with Hanzo as How the Mighty Have Fallen and have become embittered by it.
- The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie: King Neptune is presented as such, even more so than his counterpart in the actual SpongeBob series, being willing to dish out harsh punishments for incredibly petty reasons. For starters, he threatened to imprison the royal crown polisher for 20 years for simply touching his crown, the job he was hired to do, and if his daughter Mindy's statements are correct, he can barely go a single day without trying to execute someone. That being said, at the end of the movie, he gets An Aesop on how important it is to have love and compassion when you're in a position of leadership.
- Wonder Woman: Bloodlines: In this continuity, Pasiphae, who retains her Minoan status as a goddess rather than as a princess in the more well-known Greek mythology, is the one to have made her own son the Minotaur into a ceaseless guardian of the maze. She also gives incredibly vague visions that you can only make sense of if you know ichthyology.
Films — Live-Action
- Alexander: The characters all view the Greek gods whom they worship as being cruel and fickle in their favor. Philip outright tells Alexander that the only reason they're worshipped is because they're A Lighter Shade of Black than the Titans.
Philip: None will tell you this but your father: Men hate the gods! The only reason we worship any of them is because we fear worse.
- Bruce Nolan in Bruce Almighty thinks God is like this, and his actions, despite how they're presented, back this up. After all, he was perfectly willing to let thousands of people suffer at Bruce's hands just to teach him a lesson. And he's not exactly nice to Evan in the sequel either.
- Bruce himself is one when he gets God's powers. A lot of the problems he causes are basically just negligence, but he does have a few intentional acts of malice, such as the butt monkey, getting Evan fired and getting some reporters busted for drug possession. His girlfriend Grace is basically the only person he actually tries to do something nice for (Excluding the prayer-answering, which God made him do), in giving her "pleasure", and even that is debatable whether he was doing it for her benefit or his own ego and arousal. Really, you don't want to make Bruce mad. You'll regret it.
- In the 2010 Clash of the Titans, they're possibly even more dickish than in the myths. Except Apollo, who defended the humans.
- John Milton's flamboyant diatribe against God at the climax of The Devil's Advocate. ("He's a tight-ass! He's a sadist! He is an absentee landlord!")note
- In Erik the Viking, the Nordic gods (particularly Odin and Thor) are depicted as nothing but a group of apathetic kids that almost condemn the heroes into the pity of Hel for them arriving in Valhalla without being killed in battle.
- Final Destination: The Grim Reaper is real, and he hates you. He finds your silly little attempts to live amusing, and he holds grudges when you successfully cheat him out of your life. Because of Death, horrible accidents that involve the gruesome deaths of dozens if not hundreds of people happen. He's a determined son of a bitch, and will use basically anything around you to kill you, from tanning beds to lawnmowers all the way up to rollercoasters and airplanes.
- Immortals is a rare subversion of this featuring the Greek Gods. The gods do not interfere with humanity to let it develop on its own. They are so disgusted with Hyperion's actions that they want to kill him and his entire army. Zeus flip flops. He prevents the other gods from intervening until the Titans are freed in the name of free will and faith in humanity, but is force to indirectly interfere to raise a hero to lead humanity against Hyperion. Several times the gods are forced to interfere to save Zeus' hero Theseus. He kills Ares, the God of War for his interference, but spares Athena. His stubborn refusal to interfere allows the Titans to obtain freedom and starting another which he could have easily prevented.
- Odin and all his children at various points in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, even though they are Sufficiently Advanced Aliens in this universe:
- Thor, the God of Thunder, starts as one in Thor (2011), willing to attack all Frost Giants after a handful of their spies sneak into the Asgardian weapons vault. Downplayed because shortly after that, he learns humility and compassion.
- Loki, the God of Mischief, hopes to earn the appreciation (or worship) he craves and exact revenge on his brother by attempting first to kill every Frost Giant in existence and then to subjugate the entire population of Earth. Zig-zagged, because after that he gets a slow redemption arc in the next three films.
- In Thor: Ragnarok, Hela, the Goddess of Death, strives to become a Galactic Conqueror and would slaughter anyone who stands in her way, while Odin the Allfather is revealed to have been a ruthless conqueror who once bathed the Nine Realms in blood together with Hela, and then decided to change his ways (Hela herself is the one who reveals that Odin both lied about his past actions and hid the truth of Asgard's history).
- In Thor: Love and Thunder, it's shown that this goes beyond the Asgardians; All Myths Are True, and almost all gods are jackasses. It's for this reason that Gorr the God Butcher decides to enact a Final Solution on them.
- A Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy Krueger wields godlike power in the dream world, essentially making him a dream god. Rather than do anything too substantial, he uses this power to mess with his victims and carry out petty murders purely For the Evulz.
- Downplayed in Oh, God!. While God (George Burns) is not particularly malicious, He also doesn't seem to care about the difficulties that His messiah Jerry (or his family) goes through in delivering His message.
Jerry: "I lost my job, you know."
God: "Lose a job, save a world. Not a bad deal." - Calypso of Pirates of the Caribbean, goddess of the sea, fell in love with a mortal man, who was then offered the position of captain of the Flying Dutchman. The conditions of the captaincy are that you do the job for ten years, and if, after that time, your love is waiting for you when you get your one day on land for the decade, you can go free and someone takes your place; otherwise you've gotta keep doing the job until someone kills you. Calypso didn't wait and Davy Jones was stuck being the captain of the Flying Dutchman. She claimed that Davy shouldn't have expected anything else from her because she's the embodiment of the capricious and treacherous sea. The fifth movie reveals that Will had to continue being the captain even after his love did wait for him on his day: one can assume Calypso pulled the entire stipulation out of her godly ass just to get a captain for the Dutchman.
- The Rapture: Although not malicious enough to qualify as evil, during the rapture God allows many people including atheists into heaven but he also destroys both the earth and universe and demands love and servitude and withholds peace and happiness from those that don’t.
- Thor of all people in Vikingdom is depicted as a bloodthirsty madman who is furious that humanity (well, the Norsemen at least) turned his back on the old gods and began gathering many artifacts that would merge the mortal realm, Hel and Valhalla, effectively destroying all that exists to punish humans. He is also a Bad Boss too, when his mortal followers (who initially joined him in the belief they would restore the good old days) realize what he intends to do and protest, he says he doesn't care what happens to them and violently puts them in their place when they attempt to turn on him.
Jokes
- God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit go golfing. The Holy Spirit tees off with an OK shot that lands on the edge of the fairway and goes into the rough. Jesus does a great drive that lands square on the green. God takes a long time to set up, then hits a terrible drive that ricochets off a tree and goes towards the water. Just before it lands in the water, a fish leaps out of the water and swallows the ball, then a heron swoops out of the sky and picks the fish up in its mouth and flies off towards the rough. The heron squeezes the fish, which spits the ball out. The ball falls towards the water, only to be caught by a passing raven which veers back towards the course and lands in a sand trap. The raven leaves the ball in the sand, and a squirrel runs into the sandtrap, picks up the ball, carries it to the hole, and drops it in. Whereupon Jesus turns to God and says "Are you going to play golf, or are you going to fuck around?"
- A Viking longship is caught in a storm and is about to sink. Suddenly, the clouds part and a booming voice asks, "Vikings, my children, do you believe in me?" The Vikings reply, "We do, oh almighty Odin!!!" "Then put on your armor and jump overboard!" The Vikings all jump, then another opening in the clouds appear, and an even louder voice exasperatedly booms, "LOKI, WHY THE F**K!?"
Manhwa
- Doom Breaker has gods that don't care for humanity and just want entertainment.
Music
- A Central Theme of the Poets of the Fall album Jealous Gods, from the cover with a road sign warning of a Bolt of Divine Retribution, to the Title Track, musing
on the god-like sense of impulsive grandiosity inherent in a new relationship, and wondering if that's something good or bad.
- Tom Waits' song "Heartattack and Vine" (off the album of the same name) includes this lyric:
Well you know there ain't no Devil
That's just God when he's drunk - Vocaloid:
- In one of the songs that are a part of the Happiness Series, Hatsune Miku is a goddess, and while she seems nice at the beginning of the song, it quickly turns into her being an egotistical and sadistic goddess who enjoys humanity's suffering, wants the praise of humanity, and eventually wants to kill all humans.
- The song "Name of The Sin" by ryo has the goddess of fate curse a girl with deformity and ugliness just for the hell of it. She gets better.
- In one of the songs that are a part of the Happiness Series
Radio
- Old Harry's Game answers the question of "If God exists, why do bad things happen to good people?" with "Because God really doesn't like or care about us." God has a Hair-Trigger Temper and is perfectly willing to punish with hellfire anyone who doesn't live up to his nearly impossible standards, but when the few who do match up to his standards end up in Hell (which happens three times throughout the series), he refuses to do anything about it, seeing it as not his problem.
Theatre
- Angels in America: God 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!".
- Athena is one in A-Jax, causing the main character to go mad and slaughter sheep, resulting in his utter humiliation and downfall. The play opens with her gloating to Odysseus about it. Odysseus is put off.
- All the gods in Dido, Queen of Carthage, especially Jupiter and Hera. Even Venus is hardly friendly with Aeneas, and she's his mother.
- Ammut's portrayal in Jasper in Deadland has her guarding "Ammut's Gate", testing those who wish to pass through by weighing their hearts and asking them to confess their greatest regrets. If they fail, she eats their hearts, and takes great delight in doing so. In her song "Hungry for your Heart" she taunts the protagonist Jasper, rooting for him to fail her test and prove to be a "bad kid" because it's been a long time since she's gotten to eat a philandering man's heart. When Jasper passes, she's so disappointed that she crushes his heart out of spite.
- The Gods in Once on This Island are completely cruel to humans for no apparent reason, except Asaka. Agwe likes to lash them with storms for the hell of it, Papa Ge is a demon of death who also happens to be a complete Jerkass, and Erzulie manipulates Ti Moune and Daniel solely so that she can prove that she's right. They were even worse in the original book - the musical tries to make them a bit more sympathetic, whereas in the book Agwe delivers a speech about how much humans deserve to die, and Erzulie kills a completely innocent woman.
Theme Parks
- Indiana Jones Adventure at the Disney Theme Parks has the deity Mara, who will send anyone into everlasting torment just for looking into its eyes.
Visual Novels
- Fate/stay night: In the Nasuverse, pretty much all the gods were assholes, in accordance with their mythological portrayals.
- Rider's backstory illustrates this quite clearly; she is actually Medusa, and she and her sisters were born out of the wishes of mankind for deities who weren't complete dicks. The Greek gods became jealous of them and conspired to turn their worshipers against them, which led to Medusa becoming a monster. The gods aren't around anymore though, which is probably for the best.
- Gilgamesh is a jerkass demigod who plans to commit mass genocide, leaving only the strongest to serve under him. Guess he didn't learn anything, huh? Turns out, not really — this version of Gilgamesh is summoned before he actually met Enkidu and was an unrestrained tyrant. While he had bouts of memories of his friendship with Enkidu, since he didn't experience that, he defaults on being a genocidal maniac. When he's summoned as a Caster in Fate/Grand Order, he's summoned AFTER his ordeals with Enkidu, so he's instead a responsible, egomaniac good king. Throne of Heroes is weird.
- The Shinza Bansho Series has a whole pantheon's worth of gods with various levels of flaws and selfishness. They all created new universes upon their ascension, formed from their own ideals. This also means that everyone who lives in said universes have to put up with whatever Laws they are ruled under. When a jaded warrior ruling over eternal stagnation, a hopeless idealist obsessed with improving everyone's lives (including those of the villains), and a Bratty Half-Pint who rampantly abuses her status are considered among the nicer Gods, this trope is in full effect. And of course, then there is Hajun, someone considered a real piece of work even by the standards of the series.
Western Animation
- The nomadic Speakers of Castlevania (2017) consider God (the Abrahamic one) to be petty and cruel, pointing to the Tower of Babel as an example of His pettiness; Humanity's greatest accomplishment, a tower that would reach unto the heavens themselves, struck down by a jealous god who would not let His creations rival Him. She later clarifies that while the Speakers may abhor God, they have nothing but reverence for the Christ, Yeshua, who sacrificed himself for us so we could learn bottomless love and devotion.
- DuckTales (2017): This series surprisingly avoids the usual Everybody Loves Zeus approach (like in other Disney adaptations of Greek Mythology) and portrays Zeus as a self-serving, insufferable Psychopathic Manchild that not even the other gods or his own children can stand. It even reaches the point where the other gods decide to get rid of him (it doesn't last long).
- Exploding Kittens: In the beginning of the show, God is such a carefree jerkass only thinking about himself and completely ignoring his duties as God that the other inhabitans of Heaven decide to send in back to Earth as a cat so he'd relearn humanity.
- The Fairly OddParents!: Cupid is the God of Love (at least, according to him). He can be easily bribed to set a couple up, and if he's a Shipper on Deck to someone you don't want to be with, he won't care in the least.
- God is pretty much a jerk in Family Guy too. His first appearance in Season 1 has him attending church and grumbling how much "he hates it when he tells this story" when the priest tells the story of Job. He causes the Drunken Clam to burn down while trying to impress women with his ability to summon lightning bolts (killing the woman in the process), he often neglects or treats Jesus poorly, usually being portrayed as a deadbeat father, and is kind of short and annoyed in general with his worshippers when they interact directly with him.
- The telling of the Pandora's Box story in The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy fits the trope and the original story rather well. Basically, the gods trick Pandora into opening the box purely for shits and giggles.
- There are plenty of gods that make guest appearances, such as Eris, the goddess of discord and strife.
- I Am Weasel: In "The Magnificent Motorbikini", Baboon and Weasel meet a trio of all-powerful higher beings that manifest as baked hams. The hams offer to share the secrets of the universe to the duo, but upon seeing Weasel dressed in a bikini they laugh at him and refuse to share the secrets of the universe to someone who dresses unfashionably.
- My Little Pony:
- Discord from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. He's an all-powerful Reality Warper who can do pretty much anything he pleases. And just what does he use this power to do? Turn Equestria into a chaos-stricken version of its former self and drive everypony insane for his own amusement. His initial appearance paints him more as a God of Evil than just a jerkass, but his characterization in "Keep Calm and Flutter On" falls squarely in line with this trope (unless you consider "spirit of chaos and disharmony" not close enough to explicitly stated godhood, but there's no denying the "jerkass" part).
- Lord Tirek, the demonic centaur, from the same show as well, could qualify as well if not more so. He's pretty much Equestria's equivalent of Satan, especially when he drained everypony in Equestria of their magic. He rules over Equestria with an iron hoof, destroys Twilight's beloved tree home, and tries to murder the mane six For the Evulz. He's eviler than Discord as shown by him betraying Discord in a heartbeat and nearly succeeding in destroying Equestria.
- Sorcerous Overlord King Sombra seems to be this for the Crystal Empire. A millennium ago, he came seemingly out of nowhere and magically converted the entire place into a Mordor; oppressed the Crystal Ponies as his blatant, personal Slave Race; and then, once Princesses Celestia and Luna came and overthrew him for the Crystal Ponies' sake, cursed the Empire to vanish as both spite for his imprisonment and Pragmatic Villainy to preserve "his" domain until his inevitable return. And in the Season 5 finale, one of the Bad Futures shows what would've happened if said return had gone off without a hitch: He would've inflicted From Bad to Worse on the Crystal Ponies by magically brainwashing them into becoming his soldiers in a war against the rest of Equestria. As a confirmed Expy of Sauron, he can't even be mentioned without an aura of complete unpleasantness.
- The Users (ie people) in ReBoot count from the perspective of those inside the computers. While they do send upgrades and keep the machine running it's purely for pragmatic reasons while they unleash game cubes which put the sprites and binomes in danger and program viruses. The only thing that stops this from going right into God Is Evil territory is that the Users are Obliviously Evil: they don't realize the denizens of the net are living sentient beings and play games for fun without realizing the danger and damage they cause.
- Because the setting was based on Chinese Mythology, the unseen gods in Skunk Fu! come off as this. The Big Bad Dragon was the Evil Former Friend of the Big Good Master Panda, who only turned evil after being tortured for failing a nonsensical Secret Test of Character. The gods cursed the valley with a drought that threatened everyone's lives while ignoring Dragon's prayers. Against Panda's advice he used his Weather Manipulation powers to make it rain, and for his "arrogance" the gods burned him alive with a Bolt of Divine Retribution, forcing him to spend the rest of his life nursing his charred skin in an icy lake. After all this, he became a spiteful Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.
- The (freakish) version of God on South Park could qualify too. Not only does He look like a spectacularly ugly cross between an orangutan and a hippopotamus, but He is cold-hearted and hypocritical in allowing Satan to take all human beings except for Mormons to Hell, despite Himself being a Buddhist - a religion that ultimately dispenses with the idea of God. (Satan, however, couldn't be considered evil).
- It's ultimately subverted by the fact that this version of Hell isn't all that bad if you don't deserve to be there, while Heaven is so milquetoast and boring Mormons are the only people who'd enjoy it.
- SpongeBob SquarePants
- Neptune acts this way. His first appearance had him openly laugh at the thought of Spongebob being a real fry cook, then zapping Patrick with lightning for defending Spongebob. But he gets better later in the episode, as he humble accepts his defeat and acknowledge's Spongebob's worth when Spongebob passes his challenge by cooking a much tastier Krabby Patty then he did.
- Neptune's son Triton in "The Clash of Triton" on the other hand actually did care about mortals and their affairs before his father locked him in a cage because he felt that trying to improve the lives of mortals was not befitting of a god. The thousands of years he spent locked away eventually turned Triton into a jerkass god as well.
- Flynn's one appearance in TRON: Uprising is similar to the Reboot example. He's not malevolent, but he is a bit of an oblivious idiot who blows off the mounting Program-Iso tensions, Clu's power-hungry streak, and The Grid's problems with gridbugs and other stability issues. When System Guard Dyson appeals to Flynn for help in healing a nasty facial injury, Flynn is too distracted to help, leading Dyson to be one of the first (and most powerful) Programs to side with Clu in implementing the coup that left Flynn exiled and Tron grievously injured.