Which universe has the highest power levels?

[Jeivar]

I don't mean the heroes. I mean which fictional setting has the most powerful entities in general.

Warhammer 40K in general seems to be the boss when it comes to conventional warfare, but when one widens the scale it's only set in a single galaxy, and from what I understand the gods are ultimately relatively limited in the ways they can affect the material world.

The Doctor Who universe operates on a MUCH bigger scale, with empires that span entire galaxies, and Time Lords and godlike entities being able to perform outright miracles given the right circumstances. There seem to be all sorts of exotic semi-gods there that can't be fought with traditional force... but on the other hand they always seem to have some convenient "Defeat Me" button for the Doctor to press.

THEN there's Lovecraft's setting. Great Cthulhu himself (itself?) is a gigantic eldritch entity composed of matter we don't understand, so utterly alien that humans can't bear to look at him. He has knowledge and powers far beyond human comprehension, and his awakening will mean humanity's descent into a firestorm of madness and violence. And yet Cthulhu is ultimately small-fry compared to the setting's REAL big boys. He is labelled as a priest, after all. And THAT is how irrelevant humans are in the grand scheme of things.

If something like Yog-Sothoth or Nyarlathotep suddenly decide humans are in their way, I can't see what any character in fiction can do to stop them. And that's not even getting into Azathoth.

Thoughts?

[Anymage]

Many cosmoses have a capital G God expy, at which point you're talking infinity vs. infinity and they're all based off the same source.

Also, in the great scheme of things, Cthulhu isn't even that big. When he wakes up he'll be as destructive towards us as we'd be blindly walking through an ant colony, but his city happens to be on earth and he stays on the planet rather handily. Lovecraftian entities can destroy civilization as we know it, but few of them are existential threats to planetary masses. Star Wars is low on the scale, without any omnipotent entities that I'm aware of, and they can make a superweapon that blows up planets. If you can't cause at least one whole planet to stop existing, you don't really count in the ridiculous power games.

[Lord Raziere]

I'd strongly consider Homestuck:
unkillable gods who wipe out universes, screw with timelines so that only one can possibly exist where the evilest god wins, a space-warping omniscient being who manipulates people by never lying once, god tier players who can only die if they do something heroic or unjust, a ring that can make you come back to life just by putting it on, genetic codes that create beings capable of making beings that warp space itself however they want in a godlike fashion, people who see the future in various ways, a chat client that allows you to communicate across all of time and space, a system of item creation capable of making anything from anything else.....you know your high powered, when every functional Sburb session requires at least one time traveler just to manage everything thats going on.

oh and the main character has to win by literally gaining the power to retcon the STORY, not the timeline, the STORY.

[Rater202]

In the Ben 10 Multiverse there exists a race of beings, the Celestialsapiens, that are literally omnipotent.

an average member of the race can withstand being mere feet away from a bomb that would destroy the entire universe going off, can completely recreate the universe and resurrect it's inhabitants with a singleness thought after said bomb goes off, and Word of God is that this average Celestial Sapien could destroy the Multiverse with five thoughts.

A sword coated in a very thin layer of Celestialsapien flesh can cut through literally anything.

The Marvel Multiverse not only have multiple Omnipotent beings but in fact has levels of Omnipotence and progressively greater Infinities. The Cosmic Cubes can rewrite reality are nothing compared to the beings born from them, who are nothing compared to the Beyonders who created the Cubes, who are nothing against the Reality Gem, which is Nothing against the Celestial, who die in Droves to Knull, who is nothing compared to Galactus, Who is nothing compared to the Elders of the Universe, who lose to the six assembled Infinity Gems, which still just barely loses out to Eternity(to the point that Thanos was convinced to use the Gems to replace Eternity,) who is below the Living Tribunal, who is merely a representative of the One Above All, who is either the Abrahamic God or Jack Kirby. Maybe both.

and then, of course, we get people like Nathan Summers and Franklin Richards and Legion and Mad Jim Jaspers who are on paper mutants, and therefor human, but who have reality warping abilities and a crap ton of power to put in them--Franklin's a first generation Mutant whose power is actual Omnipotence. As in, as of the most recent volume of Fantastic Four, Franklin is God to thousands of universes and is fully aware of it, to the point of stating as such to one of the denizens of a world he created.

[Devonix]

A Universe with the " Highest " Setting is kind of impossible. I go back to the old. Who wins? The person writing the story. Because while your story might say that only this works, you can come up against a story that functions under different rules.

What happens when a chaos god gets hit with a JoJo stand for example. As well as any universe that has an " Omnipotent Character " And I mean the actual definition of the word, not " Semi, or such, I mean a character that is Omnipotent. And no not " True Omnipotent " Dear god I hate that word.

[GloatingSwine]

A Universe with the " Highest " Setting is kind of impossible. I go back to the old. Who wins? The person writing the story.

That or Bugs Bunny.

[HandofShadows]

As others have said Cthulhu is small potatoes in the Mythos. You want all powerful, you go to Azathoth. Why? Because all reality/every reality is just a dream it is having and just by waking up everything will be wiped away as it had never been.

[Devonix]

As others have said Cthulhu is small potatoes in the Mythos. You want all powerful, you go to Azathoth. Why? Because all reality/every reality is just a dream it is having and just by waking up everything will be wiped away as it had never been.

Yes but when you get into things like this it's impossible to quantify. Ok In Lovecraft mythos everything is the dream of Azathoth. But then you get into other universes where they say. Everything and every universe is just the dream of this person. Or it's all contained in this marble. Or it's all a book being read by this character.

Everything being the Dream of Azathoth loses credibility once you go into another writer's work. Because Lovecraft can't hold sway over the writing of another individual.

If you were to create a stick figure character and you as the writer state that said character is more powerful than Azathoth. Then you are one hundred percent correct in your statement of what you just created. And no none can tell you otherwise.

[The Glyphstone]

Can Azathoth be said to have any actual power at all, though? Influence or importance, sure - its dreams are reality, and if it ever wakes up everything ceases to exist. But it's both asleep and insane, so has no actual control over said reality. Yog-Sothoth or Nyarlathotep, being the manifest incarnations of time and space respectively, seem to be in actuality the most powerful entities in the Mythos.

[HandofShadows]

Azathoth isn't insane, it's an idiot. Which in many ways is worse than insane. As for control of reality, yes Yog-Sothoth and Nyarly have more effective control, but this isn't about effective control, but raw power. If all of reality is all a dream created by accident and unintentionally, what can Azathoth do when it actually wants to do something?

[The Glyphstone]

My argument is that power is meaningless if you lack any ability to use it. As long as it's asleep, it can't do anything, and were Azathoth to wake up, reality ceases to exist and the whole thing becomes irrelevant.

[Tyndmyr]

I don't mean the heroes. I mean which fictional setting has the most powerful entities in general.

Leaving aside the "one omnipotent god" at the top of the pinnacle in every case, since those end up being boring to compare, I'd go for the Culture. Galaxy spanning wars, solar systems transformed into habitats for amusement, functional immortality, ridiculously FTL travel with huge weapons, nigh arbitrary levels of tech in every field. And all of this is available even at a fairly low level. There are a *lot* of entities with access to this.

[GloatingSwine]

Yeah, but if Azathoth ever woke up it would be because Bugs Bunny was at the side of its bed with a set of cymbals.

That's how he rolls.

[Jeivar]

Yeah, but if Azathoth ever woke up it would be because Bugs Bunny was at the side of its bed with a set of cymbals.

That's how he rolls.

Yeah. Forget the Joker. Bugs is the true agent of chaos.

[Rater202]

Leaving aside the "one omnipotent god" at the top of the pinnacle in every case, since those end up being boring to compare, I'd go for the Culture. Galaxy spanning wars, solar systems transformed into habitats for amusement, functional immortality, ridiculously FTL travel with huge weapons, nigh arbitrary levels of tech in every field. And all of this is available even at a fairly low level. There are a *lot* of entities with access to this.

And then an average Celestialsapien from Ben 10 decides they're annoying because they're interrupting its debate with itself and they all vanish from existence, retroactively if need be.

the setting with the strongest power level is the setting with an entire thriving race of Omnipotent beings.

[The Glyphstone]

And then an average Celestialsapien from Ben 10 decides they're annoying because they're interrupting its debate with itself and they all vanish from existence, retroactively if need be.

the setting with the strongest power level is the setting with an entire thriving race of Omnipotent beings.

Though that in itself is fundamentally illogical, because by definition a setting cannot have multiple omnipotent entities.Even a single peer of equal power means you are not fully omnipotent, since something exists that can counteract you.

[Giggling Ghast]

I would say the Dragon Ball universe, where even gods of destruction are small potatoes compared to Zeno, the King of All. He could erase all of existence with a gesture.

[Kato]

I hate to be that guy but this debate is pointless because it inevitably will devolve into 'my fictional character is more omnipotent than yours'...
all kinds of settings have all kinds of omnipotent beings, which, as people have pointed out is nonsense because there cannot be more than one or that universe is doomed to implode by logic if two of them clash.

I guess you could either look for the most (true) omnipotent being among fictions or leave the peak aside and debate the second tier and argue about that with no end in sight.

[Rater202]

Though that in itself is fundamentally illogical, because by definition a setting cannot have multiple omnipotent entities.Even a single peer of equal power means you are not fully omnipotent, since something exists that can counteract you.

You're assuming that Omnipotence has to be logical.

[Tvtyrant]

I think a far more interesting question is: Which universe has the lowest power level? Where a relevant protagonist is at the lowest end of the totem poll and still matters.

Watership Down seems obvious, but I also think any police officer in DC or Marvel qualifies as they live in horrifying hell universes of monster gods and walking deities and still try to make a difference.

[Giggling Ghast]

I would think the lowest power level series is Hamtaro, where all the characters are cute hamsters.

[Ibrinar]

An universe that only exists in my head as an idle thought exercise about what stuff I should let a character do if I wanted to make him be as imba as possible and win pointless versus fight. Starting with the light speed limit only existing in our region of space because he found people moving faster than that annoying so changed reality in a 10 light year radius around himself to make it impossible, casually moving far of stars to make pictures in the sky, of course demonstrating immunity to reality warping, changing his past and a host of other abilities is important, well you can guess the rest.

Seriously though pure physical feat wise gurren lagann is pretty high with the galaxy shuriken thing. But of course there are universes with basically all mighty reality benders who win by default though we usually don't see them do much really big stuff. Maybe limiting it to what they have actually done would be more interesting. But some almighty character who rewrote the whole universe or something will win that too.

Weakest, well there is a movie about ants, there probably is also stuff about bacteria out there though I guess they have a different kind of power.

[The Glyphstone]

The only movie I can think of with explicitly (and naturally) microscopic protagonists is Osmosis Jones.

[Lord Raziere]

The only movie I can think of with explicitly (and naturally) microscopic protagonists is Osmosis Jones.

but are they weaker than Cells At Work? its a recent anime that also does the osmosis jones thing, but in its own way.

but clearly the strongest universe is Gilgamesh of Sumerian mythology, because it was the first mythology and fictional universe ever and thus caused all the other fictional universes to exist as well.

[Durkoala]

What about Inside Out? The protagonists are an eleven-year-old girl's anthromorphic emotions. They can't directly affect anything outside of her head and most of what goes on inside of her head through out the movie gets more and more out of their control as the movie goes on.

[Ibrinar]

Ah I remember there was an anime recently with the characters representing part of the immune system I think? Or maybe other small stuff in the body too. Edit: And cells at work was just mentioned.

[Traab]

Star trek has the Q continuum, who can literally reshape all of existence with the smallest thought and gesture. I dont believe they are QUITE omnipotent or omniscient, but its hard to be sure as the only real experience we get with them is the super troll who loves testing humanity to see if its worthy of its potential future.

[Gnoman]

There was that Voyager episode where a noticeable portion of the galaxy was destroyed as collateral damage from a Q on Q war.

[GloatingSwine]

There was that Voyager episode where a noticeable portion of the galaxy was destroyed as collateral damage from a Q on Q war.

Yes, but on account of it happening in Voyager it's considered impolite to mention it.

[BeerMug Paladin]

I nominate the Authyr universe.