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The Juggler of Worlds, Aurelien Police

Ego: What madness do you mouth? You are but a single being, and I a world entire!
Galactus: The words you speak are true! In all of space I stand alone... but I have no need for an ally, for I am Galactus! The be-all and the end all am I!

A cosmic entity is any being so great it can inherently affect entire planets, stars, galaxies, and possibly even the entire universe (or in some cases, entire multiverses.) If there is more than one such entity in a setting, there will usually be different levels of power between them, and often specific responsibilities as well, forming a kind of Fantasy Pantheon.

Cosmic Beings tend to not care much about "lesser beings" (anybody who isn't "cosmic") and any harm (or good) they cause is often unintentional. Because of their level of power, when they cause trouble the heroes are often forced to try to reason with them, use a Cosmic Keystone, or ask another Cosmic Entity for help (very rarely can they punch them out.)


A cosmic entity could be any of the following:


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • Ah! My Goddess has the gods and demons. They are hyper-dimensional entities that only manifest in the physical world through projections from Ygg-drasill, the world computer. When they release their limiters, they are capable of cracking dimensions and shatter planets with zero effort.
  • In Berserk, the Godhand and the Idea of Evil are the ones responsible for the Crapsack World Berserk universe is through manipulating Causality.
  • In Saint Seiya, all the gods are this, being Dimension Lords of their own domains.
  • Dragon Ball is an odd case where most of the cosmic entities are better known for their special tricks and job titles rather than their strength, many being weaker than some of the comparatively mundane martial artists, mutants and cyborgs(because this is a setting where an out of shape old man can destroy the moon if he is sufficiently skilled in martial arts). With that said, the main ones are the dragons called by said balls which can be traced back to the reality warping Zalama. Then there are the Kaioshin, gods of creation who in turn rule over lesser kai that watch over galaxies, who in turn rule over appointed gods of individual planets. Then there is Emma Dao/King Yemma and his oni/ogres, which rule the afterlife and run the reincarnation process(Dragon Ball Z: Revival of F and Dragon Ball Super imply there are multiple Oni/Ogre lords working as intermediaries between appointed gods and kai). Then, in compliment to the Kaioshin is Beerus, god of destruction, whose job is to recycle material for the Kaioshin by destroying old planets. He operates independently of them, however, once destroying an entire galaxy cluster to make the point clear. There are also angels of several kinds, whose jobs range from keeping populations planetary gods oversee from becoming too technologically advanced, to soothing souls sentenced to endure the tortures of hell, to reigning in gods who abuse their positions. Beerus was the star of a movie which touched on how a few saiyans created their own cosmic being independent of the rest. Most of the Kaioshin were killed off by another outside of the known order; a primordial entity that took on a shape known as Majin Buu by absorbing the evil of humans for eons before being dumped on the Kaioshin home worlds by an ambitious wizard.
  • YuYu Hakusho has any and all S-class beings. Even the weakest of them can bust planets and the strongest of them can handle legions of lesser S-classes while closing their eyes.
  • In Bleach, Soul King creates, watches, and sustains all of reality.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist has the Truth, who watches over every alchemy process in the universe.
  • Future Diary plays with the trope. Characters are holding a competition to see who will become the new God of the universe, with the previous God, called Deus Ex Machina, are supervising the game.
  • Lyrical Nanoha has the Book of Darkness. Well, considering it blows up planets on regular basis it goes without saying.
  • In Neon Genesis Evangelion, Adam and Lilith are two of these. Humans messing with Adam led to most of the problems in the Backstory(Adam apparently refused to actively defend itself from human exploitation but the backlash from injuring it was still a near extinction level event). The "angels" turn out to have no issue with humanity. They are just pilgrims trying to reach his remains. The one angel capable of communicating with humans isn't too happy to hear completing said pilgrimage(touching said remains) might wipe humans off the Earth, but the angels were tricked anyway by switching Adam's remains with Lilith's (angels apparently can't tell the difference at a distance).
  • One-Punch Man: Saitama. So insanely powerful to the point running faster than the speed of light is his equivalent of Nonchalant Dodge and destroys a planet-busting laser beam with..well, one punch. The more powerful villains, such as Boros and Garou, while nowhere as powerful as Saitama, are capable of becoming Galactic Conquerors relatively easily, and are so strong no one except Saitama can defeat them. None of them necessarily started out as cosmic functions either but gradually slid that way, to their mild displeasure.
  • By the end of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, the titular character has shades of this. She rewrites all of reality so that witches are no more and magical girls don't turn into them. When your powers bend reality to make it Lighter and Softer, you know you are this.
    • At the end of Rebellion, Homura Akemi qualifies too. She can break the aforementioned example into pieces, take "her mortal aspect" of her, and create an entire universe to lock said pieces for herself. Her paradise is arguably even better than Madoka's.
  • In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, pretty much the entire Spiral race, i.e. us has the capacity to build these. As do the Anti-Spirals.
  • Tenchi Muyo! has the Choushin: Hyper-dimensional entities far beyond any dimensional space, who created all of existence as an experiment, and are so far beyond the requirements for omnipotence and infinite power that "God" or "D3" is the lowest of their servants, ruling the 3-dimensional reality for them. And then there is the title character, who is as omnipotent compared to them as they are compared to regular humans.
    • Anybody who is capable of wielding lighthawk wings also qualify as cosmic entities, including Z, the Zinv, Ryoko, Ryo-Ohki, and Jurai Royal Tree ships. Being able to invert or create black holes at will, and possessing enough energy to fill a universe.
  • Toward the Terra has the Type Blue Mu(s), although their great powers can be easily nullified using Power Nullifiers.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! has too many to properly list here. Concerning the card game, it's similar to Dragon Ball in that many don't have impressive stats, due to competitive balance dictating that if they could hit hard on top of their often catastrophic abilities they would be too central to the game. Concerning the world the players of the game live in, they are lucky such things usually keep to themselves and usually just want to play the card game when they do visit civilization.

    Comic Books 
To see a more comprehensive list, see here
  • DC Comics also have their share:
    • The Over Monitor, a form of "life" so removed from our own it doesn't really qualify as a character. Nonetheless, it is "alive" in some sense of the word and the entire DC multiverse/hypertime/whathaveyou is akin to a bacterium in/on it. Beings from beyond the fifth dimension built a machine the protagonists call "Thought Robot" or "The Cosmic Armor Superman" for the purpose of traversing and studying it. Several more defined characters have taken on the title of Overmontior or been mistakenly given it by the ignorant.
    • The Writer, who adds to, subtracts from and changes the Over Monitor at will, and may or may not be responsible for putting the DC Comics setting(s) on/in it.
    • The Monitor, a being of much less significance than The Overmonitor, whose job is to keep the DC Comics multiverse running smoothly. The Monitor has an antimatter counterpart in the Anti Monitor, who often seeks to consume the positive matter multiverse.
    • The Presence, and the Source, which may be it's servant or another manifestationnote .
    • Gods of various degrees of oldness and newness. To what degree they qualify, if at all, largely depends on the story you're reading and which continuity it takes place in.
    • The higher-dimensional imps, such as Mr. Mxyzptlk, Qwsp, or Bat-Mite; and Mandrakk, the Ultimate Monitor.
    • The Archangels, including Michael, and The Wrath of God, currently better known as The Spectre. Some demons like Choronzon, while not quite as powerful, still qualify. Lucifer's original Vertigo incarnation was capable of fully comprehending The Overmoniter, giving him matter and energy manipulation of which the regular Monitor can only dream of, and The Source("servant" of The Presence in this interpretation) is often beneath his notice. Still even Lucifer was a gnat compared to his brother Michael, who was less than that to the Presence.
    • The Endless: Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair and Delirium; The White Light Entity, embodiment of Life; Nekron, embodiment of the unliving void and absence of sentience; and the Time-Trapper, either the embodiment of entropy or a sentient unlikely timeline attempting to assert its own existence.
    • Krona, the Anti-Monitor, and Imperiex. Ultimator claims to be the highest of these, and the living embodiment of the tenth dimension.
    • Kismet, the sentience of the universe, or "simply" a Lord of Order. Sometimes has a "mortal" avatar known as "The Strange Visitor".
    • The Light Entities embodying emotions/motivations and their associated colors, gradually introduced in Green Lantern beginning with Rebirth and through Blackest Night: The Butcher (Red Rage), Ophidian (Orange Greed), Parallax (Yellow Fear), Ion (Green Will), Adara (Blue Hope), Proselyte (Indigo Compassion), the Predator (Violet Love), Black Hand (Black Death), and simply "the Entity" (White Life).
    • The Phantom Stranger, or "The Gray Walker", former near-Archangel, and exile of Heaven and Hell alike. Maybe.
    • The Lords of Order and Chaos, including Doctor Fate, Mordru and the wizard Shazam! who are fundamental forces of the DC universe though this has since been retconned as of New 52 and after.
    • Superman becomes one in DC One Million. Ages ago in our far future, Superman had traveled the edges of the universe and earned vast powers on top of his already vast powers and is known as Superman Prime. Eventually retiring into the Sun and growing ever more powerful, he first creates a lineage of Supermen to defend the universe and powers our solar system by his presence in the Sun. Another version of Superman who becomes one is the "Strange Visitor"(no relation to Kismet), which is basically what happens when a story teller starts with The Silver Age version of Superman and takes his New Powers as the Plot Demands to their logical conclusion. He becomes more powerful than fifth dimensional imp Mxyzptlk basically because Mxyzptlk made the mistake of appearing in his story.
    • The New 52 introduces the World Forger, who creates universes until a Crisis occurs and he let's the old ones die out to make room for no ones. He created a dragon(bat) like creature to assist in devouring failed realities, but it shirked its duties and turned against him. He's later stated to be the brother of the previously mentioned Monitor (created to regulate the multiverse) and Anti Monitor (created to safeguard the multiverse from outside threats, rendered redundant by the Source Wall and upset about it), who are all creations of their mother Perpetua. She is a being responsible for creating whole multiverses, who herself answers to higher powers that will evaluate her creations' right to exist on the standards of whether they follow Justice or Doom. Rather than accept the possibility of failing said evaluation, she instead elected to engineer creations powerful enough to defend her with force and conquer her superiors.
  • Outside of the Big Two, there was an IDW Publishing mini-series called The Bigger Bang. Humans have advanced far enough in a short period of time, to do a manned mission to analyze the Sun. That'd be the last thing we ever do, because our entire universe gets destroyed in a new Big Bang event. The only thing to emerge from this cataclysm is a new empty universe and the being known as Cosmos, who appears entirely human except for how ridiculously muscular he is. Imagine a Bronze Age Superman given the powers of the Silver Surfer and you get Cosmos. For billions of years, Cosmos wanders the universe until he gets sucked through a wormhole and enters a new dimension where he accidentally terrifies almost all of the inhabitants with his godly powers and his reputation (these aliens knew his birth was responsible for the death of an entire ancient universe).

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The Marvel Cinematic Universe follows its comic roots by introducing plenty of these over time:
    • Doctor Strange (2016) has Dormammu, the lord and ruler of the Dark Dimension. Dormammu can stop time, fundamentally alter people and worlds, and move worlds from our dimensions to his.
    • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: A Celestial named Ego has cosmic powers which he used to create his own moon-sized world.
    • Eternals: The eponymous protagonists are creations and servants of the Celestials, immense cosmic beings that create entire galaxies and wield colossal power. One of them, Arishem the Judge, is a major figure in the story.
    • Thor: Love and Thunder: During the movie's climax, Gorr the God Butcher attempts to reach Eternity, an Anthropomorphic Personification of the universe, and use his power to wipe out all gods.

    Literature 
  • Some of the "Outer Gods" from H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos qualify. Most notably Azathoth, the Blind Idiot God, who is mindless but said to rule over all time and space.
  • The Xeelee, the rulers of the Baryonic universe in the Xeelee Sequence. They have existed since seconds after the Big Bang, and used time travel to retroactively speed their own development. They are capable of using entire galaxies as construction material.
  • The Ellimist and Crayak from Animorphs. Both of them started out as mortals but ascended due to a really weird event. The Elimist is largely good, but mysterious, and Crayak his moral opposite. A full out war between them destroyed a fair amount of The Milky Way, so these eons they stick to long games of manipulation and proxies. The entire Animorphs series is just a small blip in the game.
    • The Ellimist Chronicles shows the process of their ascensions, they actually ravaged the galaxy while still material, if insanely powerful, entities. After they both fell into black holes they realized that continuing the fight as spacetime entities would unravel the very universe.
  • A Certain Magical Index has a lot of examples, since the entire series has Fantasy Kitchen Sink and All Myths Are True as part of its setting, any being that qualifies as this in myths and religions qualifies here as well. This setting makes it perfectly possible for magicians to become beings stronger than God. The title La Persona Superiore a Dio and Majin (lit. "The one who stands above God" and "Magic Lord") are given to mages who achieves such level of power.
  • The Old High Ones of the Discworld universe, so far above the gods they consider the gods about the same as mortals. They seem to be in charge of the whole universe, and once intervened on the Discworld to alter the way the world worked to stop the reality-tearing Mage Wars. There are eight, but the only one known by name is Azrael, the Death of Universes, who keeps a clock that time follows rather than the other way around.
  • In The Elric Saga and other stories from Michael Moorcock, the Eternal Champion at its mightiest form the "Four in One" (achieved by doing a Fusion Dance between its avatars), is capable of destroying entire multiverses and is only brought into play when truly alien hostile forces invade the cosmos and threatens it. Otherwise the role of the Eternal Champion is to preserve the balance between Law and Chaos, by forcibly preventing one side from getting so much of an upper hand that it destroys the world. The Eternal Champion doesn't initiate, its actually the agent of another entity known as the Cosmic Balance that weighs the sides of Law and Chaos and this Balance may or may not be sentient. That said, it's very rare for the Cosmic Balance to need so much power from the Eternal Champion and so usually a single avatar is sent and the avatar is often just a warrior and/or sorcerer of above average ability.
  • Haruhi Suzumiya:
    • The titular character, who is basically God with no idea of what she is and what powers she had, entirely convinced that she is just a normal, if highly capable and a bit weird, high-school student. Her subconscious wishes warp reality, and since she wants for all supernatural and paranormal beings to come at her school club, it happens.
    • Among the supernatural beings who came to Haruhi's club, there is also one of these. Yuki Nagato, one of the Humanoid Interfaces of reality itself, is a Reality Warper fully capable of rewriting reality as easily as a programmer writing her own game. Her only limitations are that she couldn't affect Haruhi (which is understandable) unless she wills it.
  • Honestly, High School Dx D has tons of these, most of which are Dimension Lords.
  • Kyouran Kazoku Nikki has Gouyokuou and Gekka. Both are alien beings of insane powers with the former capable of pulverizing Earth by accident and the latter having cosmic-scale Psychic Powers.
  • Life and Death in Reaper (Ivan Navi) qualify. It is stated that they are the literal concepts and not just embodiments and exist in every part of the Universe at the same instant keeping everything going. Life even boasted how he was the first thing born in the Universe and will be around to watch the Universe end.
  • Bhelliom and Klæl of The Elenium are a pair of spirits who create new worlds and then fight for which of them decides its future path. It took all of the Elder Gods of Styric working together to banish Klæl in the distant past, and even then their spell left an opening he could use to return. Bhelliom is limited due to being trapped in his gem form but still possesses enough power to rewrite reality and create Sparhawk, a man the gods cannot control.
  • In The Sun Eater, the Quiet is a powerful entity that exists in the future, one that experiences time in reverse. It can rewrite reality by alternate time streams and grafting it onto the current one as well as project its consciousness across vast eons into the past. It also spans different points throughout space and has been able to contact its current agent Hadrian Marlowe on other planets because of this. The Quiet is dedicated to preserving the existence of the future and therefore itself, so it's battled the Mechanical Abomination known as the Mericanii A.I. which had reduced almost all of humanity into cancer blobs and were soon to evolve into CosmicEntities in their own right. The Quiet is currently taking action against the Eldritch Abomination known as the Watchers, an ancient race of life-devouring tentacled horrors that threaten the entire universe.

    Live-Action TV 
  • The universe of Doctor Who has a few. In no particular order:
    • The Time Lords themselves, who have an inherent mastery of the Time Vortex.
    • The Eternals, who would count as full-blown gods were it not for their Creative Sterility, and are to Time Lords what Time Lords are to Puny Humans.
    • The White and Black Guardians, transcendental beings who appear to be Anthropomorphic Personifications of Order and Chaos respectively. There are some indications that they are to Eternals what the Eternals are to Time Lords.
    • The Beast and Abaddon, and any other members of... whatever the Hell they are - the Beast claims to be the Devil-figure from every religion at once, and they were at least dangerous enough to require imprisonment since before the universe began.
    • The Disciples of the Light, who imprisoned the Beast and (presumably) Abaddon before time began... and don't appear to have ever done anything else, so far as we know.
    • Fenric (who may or may not be Hastur) and its unnamed opposite, implied to be effectively a God of Evil and God of Good who have existed since the dawn of time.
    • The Gods of Ragnarok who, despite their impressive name, actually seem to be one of the least powerful things on this list.
    • The Celestial Toymaker, who steals people away from the space-time continuum to his own realm so he can play games with them.
    • The Pantheon of Discord, a group of Reality-Warping entities from which The Trickster comes.
    • The Great Intelligence (who may or may not be Yog-Sothoth), an extradimensional Eldritch Abomination with mind-control and limited reality-warping powers.
    • The Chronovores, implied to be beings of the Time Vortex, one of whom (Kronos) is at least powerful enough to use a TARDIS as a plaything.
    • The Bad Wolf entity, formed when Rose Tyler sort-of-kinda merged with the TARDIS and/or the Time Vortex, which could eliminate an entire race from the universe with a thought.
    • The Anthropomorphic Personification of Time itself, which takes on the form of its chosen audience, and wishes to be free of the restraints imposed upon Time by the Time Lords' black ops group, the Division.
    • The Ancient Lights, more beings from before the beginning of the universe, for whom magic and astrology worked like science does to everyone else.
    • The Blessing, a benevolent Eldritch Abomination within the Earth with seeming absolute power over life and death within the planet's atmosphere.
    • Various Sufficiently Advanced Aliens such as Sutekh may also count.
    • In the Doctor Who Expanded Universe it is claimed there are Six Guardians including the Black and White Guardians; the Celestial Toymaker is the Crystal Guardian of Dream and Fantasy, and there is also a Red Guardian of Justice and Truth, Azure Guardian of Equilibrium and Balance, and Gold Guardian of Life and Death.
  • Star Trek
    • The Q Continuum are this, having such powers as near-total control of matter, energy, space, time, and fundamental forces.
    • Guinan claims to be an extremely long lived individual, by human standards, whose species was wiped out by The Borg. When Q sees her he immediately freaks out and tells Captain Picard she is a liar. It is heavily implied at the very least she has ways of countering a Q's powers.
  • In the Ultra Series, the titular Ultra race are this as a whole. Particularly the strongest ones such as Ultraman King, Ultraman Noa and Ultraman Legend.
  • The most powerful beings in Supernatural all fall into this category.
    • God. He created the entire universe, the angels, and humanity after all.
    • Death is either as old as God or older. According to him, neither of them can remember anymore. He holds absolute power of his sphere and can kill anything, even, apparently, God.
    • The four archangels, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Lucifer are a step below God and Death, but are still more powerful than just about everyone else. A showdown between Michael and Lucifer would result in half of the world being destroyed before it was over.
    • The Darkness existed before God created the universe and required the combined effort of God and the archangels to seal away. She's also God's sister.
    • The nameless... thing that rules over the Empty, the void where angels and demons go after they die. Whatever it is, it's power within the Empty is absolute. Not even God and the Darkness have more power than it on it's home turf.
    • Lucifer's nephilim son, Jack, even though he's still growing into his powers. So far, he's displayed the power to instantly age himself into an adult almost immediately after birth, overpower high-ranking angels, and punch holes into other universes. Thankfully for all of existence, he's nothing like his father.

    Professional Wrestling 
  • In Stampede Wrestling, Jason The Terrible and his manager The Zodiak worshipped The Almighty Luke. The Zodiak would insist that Jason must destroy their enemies because "LUKE IS ANGRY!"

    Tabletop Games 

    Toys 
  • Transformers most famously has Primus, who has a body in every Transformers continuity and while he does not serve the same purpose in every story(he's been everything from the last of the light gods to the sentient will of the universe), these bodies all exist at the same time. Then there is Unicron, who almost always is out to destroy whatever continuity he is in and automatically incarnates in a new one every time he is defeated. Unsurprisingly, this background for them came from Marvel Comics.
  • Less famously, Transformers also has The Hytherion, which looks like a combination of smelting smoke and fish in its default form but is in fact a time traveling Eldritch Abomination that feeds on the origins of planets and sometimes even entire "universes", utterly destroying them should it eat too much. To keep it in check, robots from the Cybertrons of multiple different universal streams pulled their resources together and became The Alternity, which are basically robots made out of metal that remains stable beyond 3D space that they use to build composite bodies of as many different counterparts of a single being in as many different alternate timelines and regions of space as possible.
  • The Micronauts Micronauts tie in comic had the Unipower, which in addition to being part of a group that keeps the atomic and subatomic universes separate from each other, is essentially a game keeper that preserves ecosystems by forming symbiotic bonds with specific creatures in them, to give them a chance to save themselves from disasters, invasions and such they would otherwise have no way to deal with. When it bonded with a human being, he was dubbed "Captain Universe" and treated like a superhero, which makes sense, since this is yet another one created by Marvel Comics.

    Video Games 

    Western Animation 
  • Ben 10: Celestialsapiens, who were born in "The Forge Of Creation" and can each individually alter the entire universe in whatever manner they please. Their only check seems to be that there is more than one of them.
  • Star Trek: Lower Decks: In "Moist Vessel", when Lieutenant O'Connor undergoes the ascension process, he sees a vortex with a glowing, smiling koala at its center, and he tells Ensign Tendi that the universe is balanced on the back of a giant koala. This becomes a Running Gag, with a few other characters alluding to a koala after a Near-Death Experience.

Alternative Title(s): Cosmic Being, Cosmic Entities

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