http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GodAndSatanAreBothJerks

idiots!" Lestat, Memnoch the Devil "God and the devil are!"

So, you're creating a work where the lead characters are up against The Legions of Hell. They're fighting the good fight, going up against Satan and all his demons. Of course, if they're fighting against Hell, this may lead to the question of where Heaven is. And if Heaven's fighting the fight with them, that may give them too much firepower to be interesting... or raise questions about why God, in all his wisdom, isn't doing anything else. Sometimes it's like there's a Devil, but No God, but sometimes characters know for sure there's a God, and he's simply acting as a Badass Pacifist or Stupid Neutral despite the heroes fighting for him.

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Then there's the other way: you write a work in which God Is Evil, and the characters Rage Against the Heavens. This leads to the question of whether or not Satan is Good, which can be... uncomfortable.

So, here's the solution: make it so that neither side is all that helpful. In this situation, God and Satan Are Both Jerks, and neither has humanity's best interests in mind. Hell and Satan will typically be portrayed in the classical fashion, but God and Heaven will usually be portrayed as Knights Templar who don't give a crap about humanity, exulting in their own glories or focusing all their firepower on the fight against Hell with little care for civilian casualties. There is no difference in morality any longer and the only things kept from the Abrahamic religion is that it's all about a dominant god fighting against a less powerful rebellious entity who wishes to take over and/or destroy all of creation. It may as well be a war between Eldritch Abominations.

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The end result of this trope is usually a humanistic or existentialist work, one where mankind learns to get along without Divine Intervention, taking control of their own destiny.

This setting is often home to a Nay-Theist. Related to the Balance Of Good and Evil. Why God's intervention in a world that the Devil clearly has a hand in would be considered "unfair" is left as an exercise for the reader.

Jerkass Gods is the polytheistic equivalent. Compare Evil vs. Evil as well as God Is Flawed. Often a reason for getting a live round in Religious Russian Roulette within the World of Jerkass.

Despite what you may think, Jesus Was Way Cool doesn't necessarily contradict this trope. It's not unheard of for Jesus to still be a good guy even if God is being portrayed as no better than the Devil.

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Examples:

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Anime and Manga

Comic Books

Films — Animated

Sausage Party has this as its theme. The "gods"—that is, the shoppers at the supermarket— just want to eat the food characters, whereas the "Dark Lord"—the supermarket custodian— throws the food away once it's passed its expiration date. Both are highly undesirable fates for the food, although most of them don't know the "gods" eat them until the protagonist finds out firsthand .

Films — Live-Action

In the film version of Constantine, the major angels and demons subscribe to neutrality, but the lesser ones don't. Humanity is left to sink or swim on its own, while caught between what is effectively a supernatural Cold War.

In The Prophecy, rogue Angels led by the Archangel Gabriel are out to destroy humanity because humans have usurped the angels' place in God's affections, and the demons want to destroy humanity because... well... they're demons. God himself is never encountered on-screen, but the angels still loyal to him don't seem to care much about humanity, generally being content to either sit on the sidelines while humanity suffers or focus only on fighting Gabriel's angels.

Legion had just about the same set-up, except God was actively helping the anti-human angels for a while.

The Mexican movie Macario is related to the below fairy tale "Godfather Death", but a lot of the circumstances are changed, and apparently It Was All Just A Dream. The main change is that Death is fortuitously encountered by a humble farmer called Macario, who by chance lucked out on a job and was able to buy two whole chickens for himself, and decides to go deep into the forest to eat them by himself. He runs into Death without knowing who it is, and shares a chicken with it; Death grants him the same deal: if Death appears by a sick person's bed near the side, the person will recover; but if it appears near the foot of the bed, the person will die. When Macario decides to neglect this and upset Death, he is forced to visit it in a cave in the forest, where he finds every person in the world has a candle lit representing their lifespan. Macario steals his own candle to prevent Death from taking him, but trips and his life is extinguished. Turns out Death rolled time back, and Macario DID go alone into the forest, ate both chickens and died from indigestion. This is a VERY old movie in black and white, worth checking out for its trippyness.

The Devil's Carnival uses a Black-and-Gray Morality version of this trope. Lucifer's a bit of a self-righteous asshole, and his titular Carnival is pretty horrifying, but what we've seen of Heaven so far is much worse, and Lucifer's begun developing a plan to undermine Heaven's influence by redeeming those whom God won't. Humanity's still caught in the middle, though- Lucifer's not especially good at redeeming people without completely traumatizing them in the process, and while he does take extreme offense to the idea that he has anything to do with misery on Earth (declaring dead children "God's jurisdiction", for example), it's unclear how much he really wants to see humanity saved and how much is just petty revenge on the father-figure who rejected him eons ago. God himself, meanwhile, is a bitter old man who demands absolute obedience from his red-armband-sporting angels, discards anything and anyone he deems imperfect, and looks outright startled when a deceased human man is redeemed and allowed into Heaven, suggesting it's been a long time since anyone's made it there.

Hellraiser: Judgement: The demons residing in Hell are the scary, nightmarish inquisitors of human sin, while Heaven is fine with perpetuating evil on Earth if it will strengthen devotion among the flock .

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

One common lyrical approach in Black Metal is to portray God and Satan as Not So Different. Perhaps the most extreme example of this is Deathspell Omega, who tend to portray both as nearly Eldritch Abominations.

Radio

In Old Harry's Game, God is a massive jerkass who couldn't care less about humanity but has no problem with their being disproportionately punished. Satan, who is one of the protagonists, is by far the nicer of the two, but he's still a pretty big jerk and fond of torturing the damned for his amusement. That most of the aforementioned damned actually did something to deserve ending up there, whilst those who end up there by default because God sets such impossibly high standards of behaviour seem not to be too badly off, keeps Satan on the Grey side of the show's Black and Grey Morality.

Tabletop Games

The Game Master's Guide for the game In Nomine, which concerns the War between Heaven and Hell, provides a variety of options for modifying the tone of the setting; this is one of them, referred to as "Dark Low Contrast".

The inspiration for the above, French RPG In Nomine Satanis / Magna Veritas, has a lot of this going on (most Demon Princes and about half of the Archangels are varying shades of complete asshole), although it's mostly Played for Laughs (french humor can be weird like that). Turns out the whole thing is because God actually falls under Blue-and-Orange Morality , and His actual goal is to make Creation ever more complex , which, as the number of competing sub-factions within Heaven and Hell and of minor players in the game can attest, is going quite well

Nobilis has an interesting case; the Angels of Heaven love beauty and good things — but they want to make everything fit their image of what is beautiful and right, and destroy all the things that aren't good enough for them. The Fallen of Hell, however, love everything. They'll be there for you in your darkest moments, loving you unreservedly. Just like they will for the worst the world have to offer. Which of these is better is very much up to personal interpretation. It has a similar contrast between the Light and the Dark; the Light wants human survival and grand order, while the Dark's ultimate ideal is that humanity as a whole pursues its darker side until it destroys itself - but the Light's focus on human survival isn't particularly benevolent, since it tends to show Fantastic Racism against non-humans and is willing to strip humanity of everything to ensure it survives, while the Dark also wants to free you from the restrictions you chafe under in day-to-day life. So basically, Kinda-Lawful and Sorta-Chaotic Are Also Jerks.

In Dread and Spite, the Books of Pandemonium, it turns out that Dread's demon-slaying Disciples are working for higher demons who want to win the war of Heaven and Hell for the forces of Hell, and Spite's angel-slaying Zealots are working for angels who have rebelled against Heaven because Heaven apparently doesn't give a rat's ass about human free will. Whichever side in the Heaven vs. Hell War wins, humanity loses .

. Demon: The Fallen had a history that started as Rage Against the Heavens — when it seemed like God and her loyalists were keen to let Adam and Eve remain unenlightened animals like the rest of the beasts in Eden, Lucifer and his agents (fearing a disaster that might occur if they didn't do so) raised humans up to true sapience. God, pissed off, shattered the perfect nature of Creation and reduced it to its current fallen state. However, then the Fallen started giving in to Torment... let's just say that by the time the demons got cast into the Abyss, there were few heroes on either side.

Warhammer 40K: While the Chaos Gods are as bad as you'd expect incarnations of rage, lust, betrayal (and hope) and despair (and love) to be and the C'tan are even worse, the resident gods aren't that much better: the Eldar gods were major jerks when they were still in power, and the God-Emperor (only considered a god by humanity) was a Knight Templar who killed millions (including his own men for propaganda reasons) in the name of his vision of a unified humanity ruling the galaxy. The Ecclesiarchy's rigid adherence to its morals is one of the reasons Chaos cults don't find it too hard to gain new members. The only unambiguously good divinity is Isha, the Eldar goddess of healing... and she's been trapped by Nurgle for millenia, her influence limited to whispering the cure for his latest horrific plague to her children. Even the Ultramarines' Primarch Roboute Guilliman, the closest thing to a Big Good the game ever had, is miraculously brought out of stasis and brought to his father... who it turns out still sees him as nothing more than a tool in his plan. Roboute emerges from that meeting determined to fight not for the Emperor but the Emperor's vision.



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