Reality Warper

"Martha, does our Hero Insurance cover Reality Warping?"

"Shaping reality is simply a matter of knowing where to apply pressure."

—Ixidor, reality sculptor, Magic the Gathering

Ever heard of the Superpower Lottery? Well, kid, you just won the grand prize.

You can create, change, or destroy things or even alter reality just by thinking about it.

The key issue here is how far they can take this. A character with a mild form of this power (which isn't seen very often) may be able to will a new subatomic particle into existence. A ridiculously overpowered character may be able to hiccup and accidentally tear the very fabric of the space-time continuum asunder.

Needless to say, running into characters with such powers can be incredibly chancy. Arguing with the more powerful ones is futile, especially since they can literally, in the words of Paul from The Dungeonmaster (or Adam Savage), reject your reality and substitute their own.

In both modern Speculative Fiction and older folklore, moderate versions of this ability are almost standard-issue for evil Elves, Genies (literal or otherwise, wish-based or otherwise), various other supernatural beings, Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, and Tricksters (particularly Great Gazoo), which makes this Older Than Print at least. The common modern fantasy concept of a Wish invokes this premise; *poof* and stuff happens. Cartoon Characters also often employ this ability as a gag. Eldritch Abominations are also sometimes capable of this, usually to horrible ends.

Protagonists are almost never this character type; what's the point of a story when you can just end it right then and there? If the protagonist is one of these, expect them to either have a reason for not using it or for all of the antagonists to have powers on a similar or greater scale.

Writing characters like this can be a challenge, given how easily this ability can turn into a Story-Breaker Power. Nothing can really pose much of a physical threat, unless you make liberal use of Plot Induced Stupidity or make them Forget the Phlebotinum. Such characters are especially prone to The Worf Effect and Deus Exit Machina. For the same reasons, Reality Warpers that are antagonistic towards the protagonists are prone to Just Toying with Them.

Not to be confused with Master of Illusion, since those are only pretending to change or create things. True Reality Warpers often incorporate Shapeshifting of all varieties as well as Winds of Destiny Change (not to mention heaps and heaps of Mind Screwing.)

See A God Am I for when one of these characters goes bad. Compare Your Mind Makes It Real and Clap Your Hands If You Believe. Rewriting Reality is a subtrope, often paired with a Tome of Fate or Reality Writing Book. For a funny way of doing these types in, see Puff of Logic. Not to be confused with I Reject Your Reality.

High-end Reality Warpers tend to also be Reality Makers. For the really high end ones, see The Omnipotent.

Examples of Reality Warper include:

Anime and Manga

• Haruhi Suzumiya. For that matter, Yuki and Ryouko, as well. Their powers aren't as rule-breaking as Haruhi's, but they can still launch MySQL injections into reality. And to take game-breaking to an even more absurd degree in the novels, they can even hijack Haruhi's unlimited power! The difference between Haruhi and the Interfaces is that Haruhi can create "data" out of nothing while the Interfaces can "only" alter existing data.
• In Gurren Lagann the main mech creates drills from sheer willpower for no explained reason other than boiling blood. Heck, the main plot of the series was that the Anti-Spirals were afraid of the spiral races creating so much matter through spiral power that they would turn the universe into a black hole, bringing about Spiral Nemesis. Ironically, they were beaten by Simon creating a mech over 10,000,000 light years tall to beat them.
• Emperor Charles in Code Geass attempts to become a reality warper with his Ragnarok Connection. He's foiled when Lelouch uses his Geass on God and warps reality right back again...and destroys his parents in the process.
• In the third Pokémon movie, The Spell of the Unown, the Unown have this power, and create Entei, who in turn grants a girl's wishes with the power. This quickly becomes supremely dangerous.
  • Several other Psychic and Ghost type Pokemon are said to have this ability too, most notably Gardevoir, who can actually create a wormhole out of thin air just by thinking about it.
    • Though, to be fair, it's implied that doing so would cost the Gardevoir its life due to sheer strain, so it's a rather limited example.
  • Let's not forget Palkia, the Pokemon of SPACE ITSELF, who relocated an entire town to another dimension in the tenth movie.
  • And Arceus, the creator of everything in the Pokemon universe.
• Serial Experiments Lain slowly reveals that Lain herself can do basically anything.
• Guu of Jungle wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu can basically do anything. Then again, she's an Eldritch Abomination in the shape of a little girl.
• In one of the more disturbing Story Arcs of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, Keiichi starts suspecting himself of being a Reality Warper after several people he wished to see dead died soon afterwards, eventually culminating in the entire village. It turns out to all be a series of coincidences, since everyone involved happened to be on the Big Bad's hit list. In that very order. It doesn't seem so unlikely when you consider how many times this scenario has been repeating.
  • Umineko no Naku Koro ni implies, if not flat out states, that the cycle was Lambadelta's doing. She is the witch of certainty and made Rika repeat and die for sure every time. When Lambda got bored and Rika finally broke free, Rika became the witch of miracles.
• One episode of Mushishi featured a swordsmith infected with a mushi that let him foresee disasters and warn people beforehand. Ginko gave him a medicine that would suppress them, but after his daughter died during something he hadn't dreamed of, he stopped taking it. Turns out it was actually a mushi that brought his dreams to life - causing unnatural disasters. He wouldn't have foreseen what killed his daughter because it was a normal disaster. And, one night, he dreamed of his entire village dying gruesomely...
• Drosselmeyer and Fakir from Princess Tutu.
• The Onmyou mysticism of Abenobashi Mahou Shoutengai works like this - and doesn't. It depends on your Power Level and wish to Screw Destiny.
• The Big Bad of the 12th Dragon Ball Z movie, Janemba was a Reality Warper so powerful that it had virtually complete control of the afterlife, having resurrected everyone even, and especially the old Big Bads, their corresponding dragons, and an army of Mooks, and yes even Those Wacky Nazis were revived along with Hitler himself, and managed to trap Enma Daiou, the Lord and Judge of the Dead himself in a large jelly button-shaped prison, and managed to transform Hell into a play-land full of floating jelly beans. Much of which was in one go.
  • East Kaioshin has shades of this ability, though probably only to a limited extent. We see him create an extremely powerful (and fictional) metal. Piccolo has also been seen "materializing" things.
  • Majin Buu seems to be able to alter matter with his head tentacle. His famous "turn into candy!" is the most common use of this power, used for the first time against Dabura, but it's also how he builds his house.
• The main character of Psycho Busters has a variant on this ability: If something life-threatening happens to him, he goes back in time and does it all over again. Repeatedly. Until, by pure random chance, something happens to negate the harm done to him—for example, a roof tile falling at exactly the right moment to deflect a bullet flying at his head, or a psychokinetic projectile just barely missing him...five times in a row. He's not consciously aware of this at first, so apart from occasional deja vu, he's under the impression that he's just ridiculously lucky.
• A Certain Magical Index:
  • All espers are low-level examples of this. Their powers work by substituting their own reality onto the world.
  • Aureolus Izzard demonstrates this power, being able to create objects from nothing and alter existing things with verbal commands. It's actually Master of Illusion combined with Clap Your Hands If You Believe.
  • Magic Gods are extremely powerful reality warpers. As Othinus shows, they can alter the entire universe on a whim.
• In Chaos;Head, every single major character is a Reality Warper, except they call it "Real-booting" and it can manifest in different ways. Takumi is implied to be the only person who can do it on a large scale.
• Bleach has Inoue Orihime, who can literally reject reality, depending on her current emotional state.
  • Fullbringers in general seem to all be minor-scale reality warpers, due to the fact Fullbring manipulates the "souls" in "matter", which is literally everything in reality. Among their powers, we have a "time manipulation" ability, an ability that affects "probability", and a sword that can alter the past of anything it cuts (both living and inanimate).
• At the end of Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ikari Shinji gets a bit of this. Maybe. Depending on which ending you buy into.
  • Rei Ayanami too actually. This "might" have been the goal of Gendo Ikari all along as the only means to resurrect Yui Ikari. At the very least, Rei may have been given/returned her status as Co-Creator of the Universe, and possibly created new alternate universes for other Shinjis to live in and be happy. The other Co-Creator, Kaworu Nagisa, essentially relinquished his powers too, so Rei is essentially become God. Probably. Maybe. Ok, it's still confusing...
    • Potentially, it seems the EVAs are actually designed to be able to do this for whoever can efficiently control them and combine them with the right materials. Of course, only EVA-01 ever succeeded so far...but yeah, it does have a tendency of causing reality to mess up just by its own existence at times. The Angels themselves too, since some of them can be classified as their own entire sub-universe.
• Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle reveals that Clow Reed (yes, the dude from Cardcaptor Sakura) was one of these. Just by wanting her to not die, he caused Yuuko to become undead for hundreds of years.
• This is the true power set of the RahXephon. The whole point of the ancient conspiracies going on throughout the series is to influence the pilots so they will reshape reality in a certain way.
• In Mahou Sensei Negima, Fate Averruncus seems to have a form of this ability. He's apparently able to rewrite the reality of the Magic World, mainly because it's actually an artificially created dimension, which can be modified on the fly, up to the point of erasing magic world natives from existence. The source of the power is a set of items that allows them to utilize the power of the mage that created the magic world in the first place. However, it has a rather glaring limit in that it doesn't appear to directly work on beings not originally from the magic world.
  • Actually, it's not Averruncus, but Asuna who has this ability. Fate is merely abusing her power.
  • Also Nodoka, however briefly, when she steals one of the aforementioned items from one of the bad guys and uses it to teleport herself and Asakura. The bad guy recovers it soon after, but it's still an impressive feat.
  • Jack Rakan is also a notorious violator of the rules of reality. Not only he breaks the laws of magic, but also did temporarily summoned himself into existence after being erased. It should be noted that he did this by SHEER FORCE OF WILL.
• Bobobo-Bo Bo-bobo has demonstrated this ability, but only when it's funny.
• Miharu of Nabari no Ou can do this, thanks to the Shinrabanshou (which literally basically means 'everything in the world'). It actually is harmful, though; previous users including the last vessel, his mother, have been killed by it.
• Ai Enma from Hell Girl seems to be able to do this, as seen when she's sending people to hell and during the season one finale, when she's bullying Tsugumi to make her send her father to hell. Altough maybe she was just mind raping her, it's not very clear.
• In Naruto, Izanagi, a forbidden cast-on-self Genjutsu (illusion/hypnosis) of the Uchiha clan allows them to turn any real injury inflicted on their body, up to and including death, into a genjutsu and leaving the user alive and intact. It doesn't come cheap: the controlling eye will be rendered blind after being used for a certain amount of time, though the exact limit differs depending on the user.
  • It is revealed later that Izanagi is an imitation of the Sage of the Six Path's power to spontaneously create and bring to life almost anything, which is what he used to separate the 10-tails into the nine tailed beasts.
• Just about all witches in Umineko no Naku Koro ni have powers that come down to this. Heck, the Endless Magic that Beatrice, Eva-Beatrice, Ange, and Maria use is basically defined as this. In addition, thanks to the Schrodingers Cat that the entire island of Rokkenjima has been turned into, the red, blue, and gold truths work this role, especially the blue truth.
• Ayakashi Ayashi borrows a healthy dose of this trope for Yukiatsu. His Ayagami can literally weaponize the kanji in people's names, plain and simple. How freakin' badass is that?!
• Kara no Kyoukai: reveals that Ryougi Shiki's third personality is this, due to the person's connection formed with Akasha.
• In the Eureka Seven movie, Holland explains that Renton & Eureka could create the "Agony of Doha" event which could reshape the world as they envision, like for example, a world where time stops ticking. It is widely believed in the ending that the world has either been reshaped into the world that Renton & Eureka envisioned, or Renton's entire dream world being pulled into reality.
• Kyuubey claims that Puella Magi Madoka Magica‍'‍s main character could have this power if she accepted the contract to become a Magical Girl. Come episode 12, it looks like he was right.
  • Kyuubey himself also has this power in a limited way, since he's able to give people reality-bending magic powers and can magically grant wishes, including the causality-defying, multiverse-rewriting wish Madoka makes at the end.
• The "demon" of the Advina Avis (aka Ronnie Suchiart) from Baccano!. The full extent of his reality warping abilities haven't been demonstrated, but so far include materializing and dematerializing matter at will, bestowing forbidden knowledge, granting people immortality and other abilities (as well as slapping on whatever perks and restrictions he wishes), appearing anyplace at anytime, global mind-reading, and shifting in and out of human form at will. Generally, it doesn't go around doing these sorts of things very often, however, because nigh-omnipotence can become quite boring after several-hundred millenia.
• Doraemon, with his gadgets, he can warp reality to it's full extent.
  • Check out the "what if" phone booth. It's able to create a whole new world based on the wish
• Some of the more powerful/bizarre Nen abilities in Hunter X Hunter border on Reality Warping. The straightest example is the recently introduced Alluka Zoldyck, the youngest and most feared member of the family, who can grant wishes like a genie...but with a really nasty catch.
• Sakura Yoshino of Da Capo is a witch but didn't get trained on how to control her powers because her grandmother (also a witch) died when she was young. To protect her her grandmother plants a wish granting cherry tree. In the original visual novel you learn however that Sakura is granting the wishes HERSELF and the tree is only a symbol of her power. Which is why she must excel at absolutely everything she does or people who might beat her at something will suffer accidents and possibly die. This is why she flees Japan for America and graduates from college at age 15 because to do otherwise would doom everyone around her.
  • In Da Capo 2 she's still alive and still basically a child presumably because her powers are still in effect from the first game despite the cherry tree having died further confirming the power is within herself.
• Haruka in Noein is possessed of a power known as the "Dragon Torque", which gives her the ability to do stuff like visualize alternate universes, survive interdimensional travel with no problems, and be unaffected by time stops. Unfortunately, she doesn't have any real control over this power, and its use is mostly instinctive.
• Rustyrose from Fairy Tail is only limited by his imagination.
• In the 2012 Black★Rock Shooter anime, Black Gold Saw demonstrates these kinds of powers in Other World. Though, even with this utterly broken control over the entire world they exist in, Black Gold Saw is no match for the real threat.
• Aki's Psychic Powers in Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's can best be interpreted this way. By using Duel Monsters cards as a focus, she can give the monsters a pseudo-life, and make the Spell and Trap Cards generate actual energy. The end result is, the duel becomes very real, able to injure or potentially kill her opponent, sometimes destroying the room or even a whole city block in the process. Many have compared this to a Shadow Duel, saying it's similar, only with psychic abilities rather than supernatural ones, but duelists who have experienced this type of power and Shadow Duels, including her Evil Mentor Divine, claim that Shadow Duels are even more potent. Unfortunately for Aki, she initially had very little control over her ability, and even less when she was angry, and was full of self-loathing as a result; a lot of this can be blamed on Divine, who was purposely fueling her anger while claiming to help her control her powers.
  • Divine could do this too, to a lesser degree. While he couldn't cause as much widespread destruction as Aki could (at least, if he could, it was never witnessed), he could utilize cards as potent weapons even outside of a duel, like using a Hinoama card to shoot fireballs at an enemy, or creating a real sword from a Psychic Sword card.

Comic Books

• The Marvel Universe has numerous examples:
  • Franklin Richards on the side of good.
  • Proteus on the side of bad.
  • On the "insane, or is he?" side, you have Psylocke's wacky brother Jamie.
  • The Beyonder, who was waaay too powerful for his own good. Although he did not know how to defecate until Spider-Man patiently showed him how. Way to take one for the team, Spidey.
  • Doctor Doom towards the end of The Secret Wars, which ended up being his undoing, as he was tricked into thinking about scenarios that would bring back his defeated opposers to fight him, thus making it happen.
  • The Molecule Man, Owen Reece, who can manipulate reality thanks to his ability to reshape molecules.
  • The Scarlet Witch was the entire cause of the recent^[when?] reboot attempt House of M. She recreated the world once so that mutants were in charge and then reset it back to almost right, except that there were no more mutants. (Well, other than 198, and all the rest who suddenly started getting their powers back.) And that was after killing off her husband and some of her friends, which destroyed the Avengers, when she initially lost it.
  • Billy Kaplan, aka Wiccan of the Young Avengers, has similar powers to the Scarlet Witch and may very well be the reincarnation of her lost son. So far, the worst he's done is knock out a bunch of bad guys, but that was enough to make the Avengers nervous.
  • Mad Jim Jaspers was so powerful in his reality warping that two in comic universes had to be shut down because the writers had no idea with what the hell to do with him and the universes.
    • A weaker Mad Jim from an alternate world was so powerful, his universe had to be destroyed. If the main (616) Mad Jim were to be fully powered, that may not be enough.

Merlyn: This version of Jaspers. Is too powerful, too dangerous. His counterpart could at least be halted, even if it meant destroying his entire continuum. This one is not so easily containable. And if he cannot be defeated, then the omniverse shall fall into chaos, and a new and hostile god shall play dice with matter.

• • • Given that it was made by use of his powers and taking into account its somewhat imaginative attitude to having a healing factor, the Fury might well count as well.
  • The Impossible Man from the planet Poppup, one of the Fantastic Four's earliest adversaries. He generally only displays shapeshifting in regular continuity. But a very creepy version of him appeared in the Exiles, where an alternate-universe Impossible Man became semi-psychotic due to a botched mind control attempt on him. He turned the Avengers into paper dolls, transmogrified most of the population of Washington DC into glowing butterflies, and didn't realize any of what he was doing—he was just trying to be funny. Thankfully, he managed to undo it all once he broke free.
  • In X-Statix, Arnie Lundberg was a Reality Warper who, before his Heel Face Turn, terrorized his home town in a manner reminiscent of "It's A Good Life". Oddly, he could inflict transformations on others, but couldn't fix his own severely scarred face.
  • In a back-up story in an issue of X-Men Classics, the Watcher speculated that the ability to alter the fundamental nature of reality is the ultimate power of the Phoenix Force.
  • The Sentry started out as a Flying Brick with various other ill-defined powers, but it seems the truth is he has control over matter itself.
    • He killed the Molecule Man in about 2 seconds and can resurrect himself even after being disintegrated on a molecular level. It's said that if he went completely batshit insane, the Scarlet Witch (House of M and Decimation would be nothing by comparison. Since when controlled by the Void he leveled Asgard in a matter of moments just through his flying brick powers, this is worrying. After going through a spectacular Trauma Conga Line, he has now chosen to be dead. However, for the Sentry in particular, Death Is Cheap.
  • The Ultimate Avengers version of Loki. It seems via somehow tapping into the Odinforce, he is able to do things like change Thor into a mortal form, make himself immune against Mjolnir, change the color of the sky, and teleport a host of monsters, among other uses. The trick is, he can't use it too many times at once or much of it without alerting Odin to it.
  • The Shaper of Worlds could alter reality on at least a planetary scale, but lacked imagination and so had to use others' dreams as a template. (This was because he was an evolved Cosmic Cube.) He served as a tutor in reality-shaping for Glorian, a human, and Kubik, also an evolved Cosmic Cube.
  • Anyone who wields the Infinity Gem of Reality has the power to warp reality. You do need to have the other Infinity Gems to control that power.
  • The ring of the superhero Freedom Ring can manipulate reality within a sphere of a radius of 15 feet, due to the ring holding a shard of a cosmic cube. This is a rare case of very limited reality warping, as if any creation leaves the sphere, it fades from existence.
  • Absorbing Man once used his power to duplicate the properties of a Cosmic Cube. Stuff got very strange when he started punching stuff, like transforming peopele's costumes into older versions.
• From DC Comics, the inter-dimensional imps Mr. Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite (on the Chaotic Neutral side).
  • In "Emperor Joker," Mr. Mxyzptlk accidentally gives most of his power to The Joker (on the extremely Chaotic Evil side!).
    • Earlier, at the end of the Bronze Age Batman/Hulk crossover, the Joker got reality-warping power from the above The Shaper of Worlds (Marvel).
  • Also from DC, let's not forget Neil Gaiman's The Endless from The Sandman: seven Anthropomorphic Personifications holding nigh omnipotence within their respective spheres.
  • Half the supporting cast of Grant Morrison's version of Doom Patrol, mainly villains and Anti Villains. A couple of heroes, too.
    • And on the subject of Grant Morrison, let's not forget The Writer from John Ostrander's Suicide Squad.
  • Then there's The Spectre, who's able to warp reality in some particularly inventive ways, especially when it comes to killing sinners. Not surprising, given he's God's Vengeance incarnate.
  • The mother of Cascade in Sovereign Seven: She remodels all of her Earth (architecture, fashion, technology level, etc.) every few minutes. It turns out she began as a normal (but very powerful) superhero who prevented an alien invasion but failed to stop the aliens from destroying Earth in revenge. Then she used her powers to reanimate the world, so that the daughter she was pregnant with could have some semblance of a normal life. She's also best friends with Darkseid for some reason, but how they could ever have met was never explained.
  • From the Kingdom Come universe, Jonathan Kent, the son of Superman and Wonder Woman, who has full control over hypertime.
  • And from The Authority, all the Doctors, and Jenny Quantum.
  • Shade the Changing Man shows the everyday plight of the reality warping hero.
• Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen has telekinesis down to the subatomic level, allowing him to rearrange matter at will. Technically, this is a little different from changing reality outright, but since he's the most ridiculously overpowered character in the saga, nearly everyone there considers him a Reality Warper.
• The Time Trapper can manipulate reality in everything BUT the present, hence his name, he traps you in time. Oh yeah, he can also move boulders.
• In all incarnations of the character (comic, movie, cartoon), The Mask has this ability by virtue of effectively being a real-life Tex Avery character.
• If Dr. Manhattan counts, then Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom, does too.
• The Rumor in The Umbrella Academy has the ability to tell lies that come true, which she usually does by saying "I heard a rumor that...". As her power is speech-based, it can be disabled if anything happens to her voice.
• Manservant Neville in the The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse, the graphic novel conclusion to The Middleman. To the point where defeating him requires an army consisting of every Middleman who has ever lived.
• Sebastian from Gloomcookie can do this both wittingly and on accident.
• Alfie O'Meagan from Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja. Complicated in that he's an unrepentant Psychopathic Manchild.
• The Plutonian from Irredeemable is one of these, though he isn't aware of it.
• In the very short-lived 1990s Defiant Comics series The Good Guys, it appeared that there had always been a very small number of super-powered people in the world, but the series began with a Mass Empowering Event caused by a boy who didn't know he was a Reality Warper.

Fan Works

• Brittany develops this ability in Special, and while learning how to control it turns a pillow into a goldfish and makes Lord Tubbington talk. It fits with her Cloudcuckoolander personality. It's later revealed that her powers, like some of the other kids', leaked through before the story began. Which means that some of the bizarre things she talked about (her cat reading her diary, getting lost in the sewers) most likely actually happened.

Film

• The warlocks in The Covenant don't seem to read comic books. Their hereditary magic power that they have no real name for is exactly this.
• Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare On Elm Street series of films possesses this power. Initially, he can only warp reality in the dream world, but as the series continues and his powers continue to grow, they begin to extend more and more into reality as well.
• The mysterious Strangers in Dark City use this to Mind Screw their captive humans. Technically, they're high-powered telekinetics that can warp matter into new shapes; individuals can only use it to levitate across the city and occasionally conjure doors out of solid walls (though their leader, Mr Book, is vastly more powerful); as such, the Strangers perform their best work in perfect unison, combining their powers and amplifying it through machines to reshape the City. The hero Murdock finds he has this ability as well- and is so powerful that he can create entire landscapes at will once he learns how to control his abilities.
• Several villains in The Matrix (and, later, the heroes) mixed a little of this into their combat.
  • Although technically they aren't warping reality per se, but rather, manipulating the rules of a virtual reality.
• Bruce Almighty—But, then again, he's borrowing the ability from God...
• Sutter Cane from In the Mouth of Madness appears to gain this ability once he finishes his reality-warping novel. For example, he briefly makes the entire world turn blue, temporarily removes a padded cell from time, and even rips his face open like paper to reveal a portal to another world. And naturally, he declares himself a god.
• The Beast in the Poltergeist movies (a composite spiritual entity created by, and mostly represented by, the ghost of Preacher Kane) seems to be capable of this, opening up spatial rifts that lead into other dimensions, warping rooms into Alien Geometries, controlling the weather and bringing everything from toy clowns and trees to braces and mirror images to life. Some of its powers involve creating illusions rather than truly reshaping reality, but the line between the two isn't always clear.
• This is the entire point behind the architects in Inception. Their job is to craft dreamworlds that the rest of the teams move through, while at the same time creating mazes to trap and confuse the subconscious projections of the dreamers' minds so as to keep them from attacking. Being architects, however, they can also alter the dreamworld's properties to further confuse and fight the projections, but the more they shift and alter reality, the faster the projections converge, the more violent their responses, and the more heavily they are armed.
• In The Traveler, Mr Nobody has such an ability whereby whoever hears his "confession", it will become a reality. Pretty broken ability for a ghost.

Literature

• Quite a few literary wizards have at least a mild form of this power.
  • Merlyn in The Once and Future King by T. H. White.
  • Wizards in Harry Potter have the power to conjure things using their magic. However, there are some specific rules as to what can be conjured and what cannot be, such as food. (Whether this is a limitation of magic itself or a wizard law isn't entirely clear, but at least it's addressed.)
    • It's a limitation of magic. Hermione cites the "five exceptions to Gamp's Third Law of Elemental Transfiguration" as the reason they can't poof food into existence. Sounds a lot like something she got from McGonagall, not from the wizarding lawbooks.
    • Considering that the Wizarding Ministry is at that point run by the Big Bad, and the trio are public enemies 1, 2 and 3, I doubt Hermione would be bothering about breaking the law at that point.
  • Wizards of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea universe can also Reality Warp if they were to use the Old Speech to change the true name of a thing. However, this is rarely if ever done, meaning that the magic actually practiced by wizards consists chiefly of illusions.
    • Note that this doesn't mean "illusions" as in stage magic, just "not actually creating things." For instance, you can conjure food and water—but if you do it with illusions, they won't fill you up or quench your thirst, and if you do it through reality warping, you've probably destroyed the universe, or at least put it in serious danger.
• The Lords Of Amber actually do this in reverse. Instead of changing the universe, they move themselves into successive nearly-identical universes more to their design.
  • Although the question of whether they actually travel into pre-existing universes or actually will them into existence, or even if they can grasp a fourth space-time dimension unknown to us (not unlike a 3-dimensional object would seen from the perspective of a 2-dimensional one) is never really ascertained.
• Palmer Eldritch in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick. Maybe. Some readers have argued that he gives people drugs that let them experience all sorts of bizarre things while, incidentally, causing them to gain Palmer's physical characteristics and think more like him.
  • Also, Emmanuel and Zina in The Divine Invasion also by Philip K. Dick. Either that or everyone's crazy, which is equally possible. The two characters have a disagreement over how the world should be run, reflecting perennial mystical themes and Kabbalah.
• Stephen King's It.
• George Orr in The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin sometimes wakes up to find that the world has changed to match what he was dreaming about.
• The Incanters and Rhetors in Anathem.
• The Ellimist, and his archnemesis Crayak in Animorphs.
• Anthony Fremont from the Jerome Bixby short story It's a Good Life.
  • This story was later adapted as a famous episode of The Twilight Zone. This depiction of Anthony may be the scariest example of a Reality Warper to date.
    • In the sequel, Anthony's daughter is also a warper—in fact, she's more powerful.
• The title character in the H. G. Wells short story "The Man Who Could Work Miracles" does exactly what it says he does.
• The title character of the children's picture book Harold and The Purple Crayon matter-of-factly shapes his world by drawing it with the crayon.
• Adam from Good Omens. Being a child, his unconscious alterations of reality are innocently whimsical at first...until his destiny as the Antichrist calls. He manages not to end the world through Heroic Resolve and even uses his power to prevent a showdown with the Devil himself.
  • Crowley and Aziraphale, being a demon and an angel respectively, also have reality-warping powers, though to a lesser extent. For instance, Aziraphale can turn cheap rotgut wine into "a perfectly acceptable, though rather surprised" fine older vintage. Crowley can turn the weapons of an entire management-skills-retreat paintball war into real guns.
• The Pink, one of The Brothers Grimm fairy tales. In the story, the prince is capable of granting his own wishes. Unfortunately he's not very smart. Upon finding out that the man he was raised by kidnapped him as a baby in order to exploit his abilities, the prince turns him into a poodle that eats hot coals until he belches fire. Then, instead of wishing himself to his real home, he turns his girlfriend into a pink (as in a Dianthus armeria plant) so it's easier for him to travel, and walks all the way there. Upon getting home, his mother, who was wrongfully imprisoned for his presumed death, commits suicide. His father then dies of heartbreak. The kidnapper is sentenced to death, placed in an iron maiden, and rolled down a hill into a river. The prince marries his girlfriend, becomes king, and lives happily ever after.
• Really powerful beings in the Nasuverse sometimes have access to powers called Marble Phantasm and Reality Marbles. The former basically lets the user control probability so that anything with a chance of occurring naturally will happen, while the later changes reality to conform to the user's will. So named after an analogy with a jar of marbles having exactly one white one and 99 others of various colours. While Marble Phantasm lets you always pick the white one, Reality Marble simply turns all the marbles white.
• Older Than Feudalism: The Bible:
  • Satan (and sometimes lesser demons) is/are usually depicted as having this as well, but usually limited by something like imprisonment or having to make an agreement before stealing a soul. With both it depends if there's some Truth in Television.
  • Jesus walks on water, turns water into wine, heals diseases with just a touch, raises the dead, feeds five thousand men (and the women and children with them) with only a few small barley loaves and a couple of small fish, dies and resurrects himself...
  • Once, the sun was ready to set during a war that lasted all day, but Joshua, current leader of the Israelites, figured that their enemies would try to escape under the cover of darkness, so he shouted, "Sun, be motionless!" so that the war could continue uninterrupted and his men could make sure that every last enemy was killed and God made it happen.
  • As Cracked.com put it in their "5 Superpowers From the Bible That Put Marvel and DC to Shame"...

Jesus told them they were faithless wusses and the disciples shut up. If that wasn't cool enough, he chewed out the storm, and it shut up, too. That has to be our favorite part, how he's just annoyed by the whole thing, as if being bothered to stop an entire weather system was equivalent to getting woken up by your girlfriend to go kill a spider in the bathroom.

• The Islamic Spirits called Jinn (Genies) are said to have this power.
• The Dancers at the End of Time by Michael Moorcock shows Earth 1 million years in the future, where mankind is a whole civilization of reality warpers... well, a decadent civilization, their (our) numbers being reduced to a few dozens, and the fact that they (we) have used and abused their reality bending powers for 1 million years means that almost all the energy of the universe has been used up and the heat death of the universe is imminent until one of them discovers that, being part of a multiverse, the real amount of usable energy is endless: tapping a tiny bit of energy in a infinity of universes is harmless and allows the dancers to continue their dance, forever, and ever, and ever, and ever...
• In Dan Abnett's Ravenor books, the Chaotic language Enucia is a powerful reality warper.
• In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts books, Soric's psychic abilities conjure up things, including messages in his own handwriting from the future. When he is imprisoned, they strip him of all effects and his room soon fills with paper nonetheless. (Unfortunately.)
• In one story in Lord Dunsany's Time and the Gods, a king offends the gods, so they decide to forget he ever existed.
• Coin the Sourcerer, in Sourcery. Whereas normal Discworld magic requires hours of research, lots of preparation and, due to innate physical laws, exactly as much effort as doing things normally, a sourcerer can alter the world with a snap of his fingers. The bad news is that once the wizards get their hands on this power, they start recreating the Mage Wars, which means Innocent Bystanders run the risk of being Reality Warped into a non-viable form. The really bad news is that all this Reality Warping weakens the fabric of said reality, allowing the Things From The Dungeon Dimensions in.
• One particularly memorable scene from Wicked (The book, not the play) was Elphaba's sighting of a sickly Chistery from across a river. Despite her famous allergy to water, she bucks up and steps into the raging river... only for it to freeze beneath her. When her son recalls this in the next book he cites it as "The world bending itself to meet her will."
• Daniel from The Dangerous Days of Daniel X by James Patterson. He can do most of the things listed in the description, as well as create people. The only "catch" is that the people must once have existed. An example is that he often creates his dead parents and his sister that his mom was pregnant with when she died. He is also a Voluntary Shapeshifter.
  • Of course, the problem is, there are plenty of bad guys around who can do the same thing, and some of them are better at it than he is. And he's just as vulnerable to sneak attacks, ambushes, and underhanded tricks as the next man, and when you're fighting other reality warpers, those tricks can be SERIOUSLY underhanded. For example, the Big Bad of the book gets the upperhand on Daniel by taking the form of a girl, and making Daniel fall for her.
• Sphere, by Michael Crichton, has the, well, sphere, which causes people who go into it to gain this power. Of course, causes all sorts of havoc when people get it who are deathly afraid of giant squid, and so keep thinking about them. Interestingly, the only way to open the sphere up to get inside it is to visualise it opening.
• Jeffty from Harlan Ellison's short story "Jeffty is Five". Albeit his power just works in a very specific way - he stays a five-year-old boy forever, and also preserves somehow the media he loves. His radio plays serial programs no longer produced on radio stations that no longer exist. They are contemporary, all-new shows, however; not re-runs. He can buy comics such as The Shadow and Doc Savage that are, again, all-new although they are no longer being produced, not to mention long discontinued pulp magazines with new stories by Stanley G. Weinbaum, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard despite the authors being long dead. Jeffty can even watch films that are adaptations of old pulp novels like Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man.
• Speaking of Alfred Bester, Gully Foyle from The Stars My Destination (aka Tiger! Tiger!) ends up doing a bit of this.
• Master of Space and Time by Rudy Rucker has a scientist invent a machine that makes him... Well, I'll let you guess.
• The Eyes of Kid Midas plays this quite darkly. The artifact that's used to change reality can do anything and everything, as tested when the main character says that two plus two makes five—but whatever it's done, it can't undo. The main character has even less self-control than Haruhi Suzumiya, so by the climax, reality itself is fragmenting.
• Anyone who gains access to even some of the power of the Well World computer (or develops an analogous system). The human-built computer Obie has the power to warp a planet. The Well is the operating system for the Universe, and has been rebooted several times (thankfully by the good guys).
• In the Ethshar novels by Lawrence Watt-Evans, every other magical discipline follows rules and involves some kind of work, but warlockry, which manifests suddenly in a percentage of the population in Night of Madness, is an ability to do anything effortlessly just by willing it. This power is checked by the fact that every warlock hears an eldritch whispering in their head and feels drawn toward the same mysterious location, and both of these things grow stronger every time they use it. The more they use their powers, the sooner they will end up there, either of their own accord or kicking and screaming through the sky from anywhere in the world. Nobody knows what's there, because nobody ever comes back.
  • Warlockry seems more like Psionics, with most powers focused on the self, but Wizardy even though not effortless, does seem to have less in the way of limits if you know the rituals to follow. And a single change can have massive unintended consequences.
• The Secret, a supposedly non-fiction book that supposedly teaches the reader to do this through Positive Thinking.
• "Mr. Sunshine" from Matt Ruff's novel Fool on the Hill. Retired Greek God who writes fiction by manipulating the lives of people—and his preferred genres are drama and tragedy.
• Various characters in Greg Egan's fairly hard sci-fi novel Quarantine gain the ability to arbitrarily collapse quantum wave functions, as long as no normals are watching. This ranges from the trivial (choosing the spin of an ion in a Stern-Gerlach experiment) through to the fairly useful (walking through walls) to the totally disastrous (everyone warping reality uncontrollably at the same time)
• Damara, the protagonist of Tim Waggoner's Pandora Drive, has reality warping powers over which she doesn't have much control. She struggles to suppress her imagination so that she doesn't unintentionally turn her thoughts into reality, but her power slips out anyway and starts warping reality in accordance with the horrific thoughts of other people.
• Frank Dominio, the Ax Crazy Anti-Hero of Thomas Ligotti's novella My Work Is Not Yet Done, becomes this after a bizarre accident. And boy, does he milk it!
• Augustus Stratton from the manuscript "SCIENCE!", a.k.a. "True Science," is the poster child for this trope. And because you, my dear reader, are seeing these words right now, that means you are merely a part of Stratton's mind. Stratton created this trope. He created this website. Why? Because only he! Knows! SCIENCE!, and only he can bend reality!
• Similar to The Matrix example above (but predating it), the main character in Sergey Lukyanenko's Labyrinth Of Reflections gains superhuman abilities in a virtual world after interacting with an entity of unknown origin. He flies, is immune to attacks, and can erase any log he wants with a thought. His powers also extend to the real world, as he can connect to the virtual reality without the use of a computer or an Internet connection. Attempting to get rid of these powers can lead to some nasty consequences, as evidenced by the second book False Mirrors.
• The Nightside has Jessica Sorrow, who believes herself to be the only "real" thing in the world and can subsequently make anyone or anything not exist.
  • Madman was potentially even more powerful, as his Reality Warper abilities weren't limited to erasing things, but could alter them at will. His insanity barred him from directing his power to any specific purpose, however.
  • Hadleigh Oblivion is another extremely powerful Nightside warper, while his kid brother Tommy is a mild one: he can change things only so far as he can make an existential argument that they could've already been that way.
• The Reality Dysfunction in The Night's Dawn Trilogy. The possessors use it to change their environments to fit the area they had lived in, and to form their new bodies to look how they once looked - but the latter turns out to be a rather bad idea, as mutating cells naturally leads to cancer. In general, though, the Dysfunction can create or alter anything the possessors like, fuelled by their wishes and emotions.
• In Stormcaller by P.L. Blair, the main character, Kathryn Morales, gains this talent (called Shaping) when she crosses to the Otherside. She actually shapes herself to be Kathryn Half-elven, a former RPG character she'd played, and forgets she's not, unconsciously.
• The female lead of Of Two Minds comes from a society where everyone can do this. Most people deliberately restrain themselves, but both she and the villain believe that the power should be used to make life better (or at least more exciting.) The sequel takes this a step further: everyone has the potential for this, but people grew sick of living in a World of Chaos, and most societies gave up the power.
• All magicians in Gwyneth Jones' Bold as Love series - from Rufus O'Niall, Fiorinda and Janelle Firdous, the three who achieve fusion and potential Neurobomb status, to barely active cyrstal-swinging hippies like Anne-Marie Wing - are Reality Warpers with the ability to rearrange "the 0s and 1s" of the universe as it suits them depending on how many other minds' power they're able to hijack at the time. Since having full-blown functional magic in this universe also invariably means having severe forest-fire brain damage and schizophrenia, this is definitely not a comfortable thing to be dealing with.
• Labyrinths of Echo often plays with this. As adepts of the Invisible Magic used to say, "The future is pliable... and the past, too." The series' cosmology includes places (sometimes whole worlds or alternative fragments of others, sometimes not) in borderline states of existence - that "could have been", are "almost real", etc. Naturally, this status isn't fixed: an "almost ripe" worldlet can be made completely real, or an existing world may die by degrading into a forgotten mirage rather than more physical destruction. Which almost happened to the World of the Rod including the eponymous city - the protagonist was invited to join the team working to prevent the place from going over the edge.
  • Max himself has a rare (and dangerous to himself) power of "the Arbiter": whatever he truly wishes, goes - "sooner or later, one way or another". An imperfect emulation of this is done via Invisible Magic. According to some of his "colleagues", the purpose of such people is to assist in "birth" of the worlds ready to become real places. Also, as Juffin was told by his older advisor and was shown in side-stories, there are creatures using this for a weird rebirth cycle: anyone with power can give them opening and gradually call into life - from a wizard trying to create the ideal stand-in for himself to ladies talented in magic but unaware of its reality, who imagine one chair in the house they leased is haunted and invent stories about the ghost just for fun.
  • "Dense dreams" involve creation or manipulation of places and entities of low-grade objective existence - not just "empty dreams", but places that can be visited bodily like any other world, yet not quite real - pliable and dependent on the dreamer. Juffin got rid of Loyso Pondokhva by trapping him in such a worldlet until further notice - ironic punishment for trying to destroy his own world, because now he had to protect the existence of this hellish place by keeping the "insufferable hag" who dreamed it up effectively immortal. Usually seeing dense dreams is a talent not known even to the dreamer, but Masters of Dreams know the difference, use it and the greatest ones can call into their world things they create in controlled dreams. One ancient master managed to overwrite with his favourite dream a large piece of land - people, underground and underwater constructions, soil layers, everything - without any ill will, simply because he liked to watch badlands teeming with mirages and insane winds wailing furious songs and thought it would be cool to make this particular place permanent.

Live Action TV

• The classic: Samantha of Bewitched and all her relatives—when they could control their powers.
• Likewise Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie, who once made every day of the week Sunday!
• Anya, not to mention several other supernatural beings in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Anya in particular can only warp reality while granting other people's wishes for vengeance (though she has a lot of leeway in how she grants them), which at one point leads to a Travelling Salesman Montage of her uselessly trying to cajole everyone she knows into making a wish that'll let her use her powers.
  • The Order of Dagon was a group of monks who altered reality to make Dawn fit in the world.
  • Likewise, evil sorcerer and demon Cyvus Vail led the team of wizards who altered reality to give Connor a new life.
• Quite a few of the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens in Doctor Who, such as the Celestial Toymaker in the old series story of the same name, and "the psychic girl with the crayons" (to quote a Comedy Sketch parody) in the new series episode "Fear Her".
  • Some of the Expanded Universe media set in the Whoniverse have hinted or stated outright that the Doctor himself, if not the Time Lords generally, have Reality Warping powers, too. The webcast Death Comes to Time confirmed as much, though many fans consider this as having taken place in an Alternate Continuity, for that and a few other reasons.
    • In one of the Eighth Doctor Adventures novels, the Doctor demonstrates a mild form of this. Since all things are mostly empty space, supposedly, there's a probability two items will pass through each other. The Doctor spends several hours throwing a ball at the wall, and eventually "collapses the wave function" to make the ball finally go through the wall... just for the cheap thrill of hitting Fitz in the head with a ball through a wall. Oddly, he never tries this under plot-relevant circumstances. He also once teleported with math. Or something. He got teleported right back to his original location eventually, though.
  • In The Parting of the Ways, Rose temporarily acquires this ability, at the ultimate cost of the Doctor losing another regeneration by absorbing the power's source, the "Time Vortex", from Rose. The implication is that if Rose held on to it for too long, it would kill her. The ensuing Deus Ex Machina does make you wonder why the Doctor never used the trick before; presumably, the effects of swallowing the Time Vortex are too unpredictable to depend on it, plus the aforementioned cost of one's life. Also, he later references it, saying "No one's ever meant to have that power. If a Time Lord did that he'd become a god—a vengeful god.", so it's probable that he doesn't dare risk it.
    • Especially after his time as Time Lord Victorious.
  • There's also the Trickster, although his powers are rather limited; he would need to trick others into making a choice which would change reality. He'll often attack the Doctor's companions, such as Sarah-Jane or Donna.
• The Star Trek universe also has a few, such as Q, the Organians, The Douwd, Trelane, and Charlie X. A trip through the galactic barrier can give you such abilities and even the power to pass them on, but of course With Great Power Comes Great Insanity...
  • Depending on who you ask, Trelane was a Q.
  • Some novels also claim that the Galactic Barrier was either created or influenced by the Q (in one trilogy, it was created by the Q Continuum to keep a Big Bad out; in the book where Trelane was a Q, our "beloved" Q was nearly destroyed and spent millennia in the Barrier, causing anyone who passed to go insane).
• The Twilight Zone episodes
  • "It's a Good Life" (mentoned elsewhere on this page)
  • "The Mind and the Matter". A man learns how to control reality by reading a book.
• In an episode of Farscape Scorpius briefly becomes a virtual Reality Warper when Crichton tries to trap him in a VR game (It Seemed Like a Good Idea At the Time), dissolving a character into a tangle of equations and transforming Crichton's pulse pistol into a banana.
  • A more concrete example would be found in the form of Einstein, the representative of the True Ancients: in his first episode alone, he opened a wormhole at will, created an entire dimension for Crichton's temporary use, and "wrapped time around his little finger."
  • Maldis, the villain of "That Old Black Magic" and "Picture If You Will," used a mixture of this and illusionism: sometimes crafting whole worlds for his minions to wander, sometimes taunting them with hallucinations and visions. And he even has A Wizard Did It quote to explain himself to Crichton:

The words I need elude translation's grasp./Suffice to say I simply wished you here.

• Supernatural brought us the Trickster, a demi-god that likes to roam around, deflating egos, breaking the haughty, and causing mayhem in general. While not actively evil, the Trickster's sense of humor can, on occasion, be quite lethal. As of Season 5, it has been revealed that the Trickster is not a demi-god at all but is actually the Archangel Gabriel. He basically ran away from his family because he couldn't take all the fighting.
• Charmed has a character named Billie Jenkins who has the power of thought projection. She managed to bring plants to life, turn her parents into assassins, and even time travel.
  • Several other characters also had Reality Warping as part of their power sets, like Wyatt, the Avatars, and the Cleaners.
• Wizards in Wizards of Waverly Place have an almost absurd ability to do this with almost no effort. A casual spell used by Alex early in the series allowed her to rewind time, and in the movie an equally unintended magical effect allowed her to rewrite the last 16 or so years of reality.
  • The effect in the movie used a special magic wand. She's not normally capable of doing this. And many series with characters who don't normally have such powerful abilities can rewind time, because it feels like a small change—only when Fridge Logic takes effect do you realize how big it really is.
• In Babylon 5, a tiny handful of telepaths can do this. A fraction of telepaths have telekinetic ability, and the Psi Corps conducted experiments on them to increase said ability. The Psi Corps are amateurs next to the Vorlons, though, who probably planted telepathic traits in the human gene pool in the first place. They "changed" Lyta Alexander, who started as a registered telepath of modest ability, to make her into a psychic doomsday weapon. When Garibaldi warned her that they shouldn't discuss her abilities in front of a security camera, she casually asked "what camera?" and willed it out of existence.
  • There was also Jason Ironheart, the mostly-successful attempt at creating a super-telekinetic. Unfortunately, his powers quickly got out of control as they kept exponentially increasing, eventually turning him into an Energy Being. He killed the scientist who created him in order to ensure the process couldn't be repeated.
  • The techno-mages appear to have this ability, but it is, in fact, highly advanced technology created by the Shadows mixed with illusion and theatrics.
• In Lost, Jacob is seemingly an example of this, though his powers do apparently have certain limitations. He can grant immortality, heal people, and prevent people from being able to kill themselves, all just by touching them. He can also see into peoples' lives and draw them to the Island at will. And his powers seem to remain active even after his own death. He can't bring people back from the dead, though. And he prefers not to interfere too much with people in the first place. After bringing them to the Island, he basically takes a hands-off approach instead of helping them.
• In the novelization of the 1998 Merlin series, it is explained that fairy magic relies on illusion, and humans cannot use such magic. However, Half Human Hybrids can combine fairy illusion with human feeling, causing the illusions to come to life in reality, giving them this power.
• In an episode of The Secret World of Alex Mack, Alex temporarily gets the uncontrollable power to make her daydreams reality, leading to several awkward situations where she's nearly caught by Vince and Dave.
• Art Kanji-Daemon in My Little Town.

Tabletop Games

• High End Mages in the Mage: The Awakening. Some Changelings can also do this, albeit to a much more limited extent, by manipulating Glamour. Inverted with the Technocracy, who were originally responsible for there being a reality to warp.
  • And with the release of the supplement "Imperial Mysteries", archmasters can now officially retroactively change reality. Looks like those elder vampires may not be senile after all, they just remember the way the world used to work before the archmasters changed it.
  • In the Fan-made line Genius: The Transgression you have the Unmada, geniuses who believe their own theories are really how the world works and that everybody else in crazy or deluded. When they stay in one play for too long, their Mania starts warping the world around them to reflect their beliefs.
• Like its successor, Mage: The Ascension gives its character the ability to bend reality, but they're usually kept in check by Paradox. The Marauders, however, are not; due to the circumstances of their Awakening, they have the ability to flout Paradox, making it hit other mages instead of themselves. On the other hand, they get Quiet, which reflects just how much reality disagrees with them; if it hits a certain point, they're exiled from this world and free to run merry in realms of their own madness.
• While the magic in Dungeons & Dragons is typically much more functional, spellcasters can pull this off with the Limited Wish and Wish spells (though the precise limits of these depend on the exact edition, and the latest doesn't seem to have any such magic just yet).
  • More to the point, the Wizard/Sorcerer spell Genesis allows the caster to create his own demiplane with any environment that reflects "most any desire the spellcaster can visualize."
  • Also quite literal when visiting the otherworldly plane of Limbo in D&D, which is a chaotic stew of all elements, energies, and other exotic substances usually lumped together under the designation "Chaosstuff" (really). With an effort of will, a character can force the Chaosstuff into orderly form, but not for long; only the anarchs, innate Limbo-shapers of the githzerai species, can do it unconsciously - even while they sleep.
  • There is also the clerical Miracle spell in third edition, but that's arguably more a request for divine intervention in a form desired by the caster right now than an actual reality warp.
    • Miracle is the roughly the divine equivalent of the arcane Wish spell. The effect is the same, it just has a different name and different logic behind it.
  • Psionics are a textbook example of this trope, es it all boils down to thinking about something, and then making that happen with your mind.
• This is why residents of Vechor in the Ravenloft setting are glad their darklord-king, Easan the Mad, is usually too busy with his deranged experiments to notice them. If he does, he may decide they would be happier with, say, three extra arms or a river of grape-flavored wallpaper paste flowing through their backyard.
• The Nobles of Nobilis. The game is about playing as one of them.
• High-level psykers in Warhammer 40,000, known as 'apex-levels', have the ability to change physical reality by thought alone. Unfortunately, human minds were not designed to handle so much exposure to the Warp and these individuals are inevitably driven insane the moment they awaken to their powers, with catastrophic results.
  • All the Necron C'tan, ancient physical gods can bend reality like a pretzel, but none of the C'tan are more famous for this than The Deceiver.
    • Ursarkar Creed, with the ability to deploy anything that isn't cavalry (that includes skyscraper-sized Titans, mind), is jokingly alleged to be this by the community.
  • The ultimate goal of all Chaos followers is to ascend and become an immortal Daemon Prince with absolute mastery of the Warp. They spend most of their time ruling Daemon Worlds, planets where physics is a fun joke you tell your friends and the only law is the will of their masters.
• GURPS also has a variety of reality warping spells, including (in ascending order of power): Lesser Wish, Wish, and Great Wish. They're all ridiculously expensive to cast, especially Great Wish (duh), thus you can only create one by hard work over a long period of time. (But if you find an item with a Wish enchantment already on it, you can activate the spell with ease.)
• Planeswalkers in Magic: The Gathering used to make ample use of this skill before The Mending, which really only dampened their ability. Especially Teferi, who funneled magic from an incoming inter-planer attack to phase his entire homeland out of existence for centuries.
  • Although Ixidor was not a planeswalker, he possessed the unique ability to sculpt reality. He used this to create a small kingdom in the desert and transformed his own arm into Akroma, the Angel of Wrath.
    • Ixidor wasn't always a Reality Warper. He used to be an illusionist. Then his illusions became real.
• The "Language" Madness Talent from Don't Lose Your Mind, a supplement for Don't Rest Your Head, lets one of the Awake alter reality by speaking the secret language God used to create the universe. If they become a Nightmare, they're at risk of becoming the Omnipotent Third Person, a mindless, disembodied narrator who corrupts and twists reality by describing it.
  • Several other Madness Talents provided in that book are narrower Reality Warper abilities -- "Teddy" in particular lets you harm or destroy things by harming a teddy bear you possess—and since the player is free to come up with their own Madness Talents, they can make their own that are also Reality Warper abilities.
• An alarming number of NPCs—including several Big Bad candidates—in Over the Edge.
• Numerous beings in Exalted are capable of some degree of this (especially Raksha and Primordials). However, the Solar Exalted are by far the most capable. Not only are their Lore Charms able to impose order and structure on the Wyld to create beings, objects or places, but at higher levels they can access a Charm that allows them to fundamentally alter the universal principles that apply to the things that they create. Through an extremely difficult mechanism called a "Miracle Shell", they are capable of applying such alterations to Creation itself, allowing them to redefine or add pretty much anything to it.
• In Mutants and Masterminds, the power of choice for Reality Warpers would be Animate Object - which can be used to bend the air to your will. Combined with Create Object and Transform, you can very nearly manipulate every aspect of your environment with a thought.
• In Toon: The Cartoon RPG, characters can take the power of Cosmic Shift, which allows them to warp reality on a minor scale to achieve any of three purposes (or because the Animator thinks it would be funny):

1. 1. To deal damage to an opponent.
   2. To prevent damage being dealt to their character.
   3. To advance their character's Beliefs and Goals.

• • There is also a smaller form, in that failing a Smarts check allows you to do something blatantly impossible because your character is too dumb to realise they can't do that.
• Certain Non-Euclidian aspect thulhu from Pokethulhu including an example from the sourcebook that has the ability to trap people and thulhu in a Pocket Dimension.
• In Grimm, any character with Imagination as their iconic core trait becomes one in the Grimm Lands, able to manipulate the imagination-stuff made real of the Grimm Lands through sheer force of will and creativity. Dreamers, however, are better than it than anyone, having a higher starting Imagination and getting it as a free iconic core trait in addition to their normal one. They can even put their normal iconic core trait into Imagination as well, making them even more potent—when spending Imagination to alter the Grimm lands, each single point spent counts as two.

Video Games

• The Nasuverse has a form of the mild variety in Reality Marbles. They are usually used by demons and other outsiders to materialize the user's own inner reality, supplanting the World's. Of course, the World doesn't like you rejecting reality to substitute your own and vehemently sets about crushing it, leading to short duration and all but draining the user. It also has limits, as the user can't freely manipulate their Reality Marble. Rather, it is imposing what your heart believes in reality onto the outside world. Given this, it is nearly impossible for normal humans (i.e. not vampires, etc) to obtain one. So naturally, they based a game around one.
• "Your power is very honest. It will bend reality around your wish."
• Amaterasu, the protagonist of Ōkami, has the power to alter reality with her Celestial Brush. She can use it to slice things in half, fix broken bridges (unfortunately, she still has to deal with that kind), bloom trees, climb walls, light things on fire, cause windstorms, and various other nifty things once she finds out how. And did we mention that she's not only a god, but a Wolf?
  • Chibiterasu, the protagonist of Ōkamiden, also has these powers, although he is purported to be less powerful than Ammy due to being a "new existence."
• Yukari Yakumo, of the Touhou series, has complete power over boundaries. I'm not talking about walls or fences here, I mean the boundaries between Dreams and Reality, Life and Death, Truth and Lies, or pretty much anything consisting of two opposites. This power goes to comical levels; she can never truly die, as she can simply manipulate the border of Life and Death and be alive again (she also did this to another person), and she once created a portal to the moon by looking into the moon's reflection in a lake, and manipulating the border between truth and lies. She's never been truly beaten in any of the games (this is a series where everyone is a Game Breaker), and instead leads the protagonists on behind the scenes.
  • Reimu Hakurei also somewhat counts in that her Last Word "Fantasy Heaven", the most powerful Spellcard in her arsenal, allows her to simply "float away from reality", making any attempt to attack her futile. Thankfully, because battles are largely regarded as games in Gensoukyou, she has a self-imposed time limit to this spell (around a minute). Doesn't really help much considering that this spellcard is considered by some to be the second, if not THE toughest one to beat in the game. According to Word of God, however, if she were to ever use this spell without the time limit, it would be impossible to defeat no matter what the method.
  • This doesn't say much in a world where people can move at appreciable fractions of the speed of light, invite mortal souls to death, remove a boundary that keeps the place existing, manipulate fate, or just flat out destroy anything, however. If the characters ever really tried to kill each other, whoever went first would pretty much win instantly.
  • Other characters, though due to either less power or experience are nowhere near the levels of the above two, possess aspects of this trope as well. Shinki created the entirety of Makai and its inhabitants, although her rule is not absolute. Remilia Scarlet can manipulate Fate, which has some interesting implications, however either she never uses it or it is an unconscious ability. Keine Kamishirasawa can "eat" and hide history, as well as create brand new history in her hakutaku form, however her mastery of it is tenuous at best (for example she couldn't successfully hide the Human Village from the protagonists in Imperishable Night). Sanae Kochiya possesses the power to create miracles, but this appears to be another unconscious ability.
• The villain Entropy in Freedom Force warps reality by merely existing. Of course, since her continued existence would eventually destroy the universe, the heroes had to take her down.
• Alessa Gillespie, in Silent Hill.
• Alma from the F.E.A.R. series has Psychic Powers that rise to this level. So far, in the Canon, she's shown the ability to exist past her physical death, shred people to bloody skeletons, and conjure "ghosts" out of nothing just by thinking about it. It's hinted that these are fairly low on the spectrum of her abilities, although we have yet to see more of what she can do outside of the non-canonical expansions.
  • If you do include those expansions, though, her powers include, at the very least, the ability to bring the dead back to life—in a setting that doesn't operate under Death Is Cheap—wipe a city clean of inhabitants without a trace, spontaneously disintegrate objects, and generally just bend reality to her slightest whim.
  • We've now gotten to see more of what she can do canonically in Project Origin, and it's not much less impressive. At the very least, she can create real ghosts now—coalescing the psychic remnants of the dead into very angry, invincible creatures bent on the destruction of the living—and turn people into mindless slaves with the psychic ability to reanimate corpses and use them like puppets.
  • And its implied she can do far, far worse if she wasn't distracted by Becket. Snake Fist himself calls her the "mother of the apocalypse" and is convinced that if Becket can't contain Alma, "everybody dies."
  • A pretty blatant example of reality warping in action takes place in Wade Elementary, when Alma separates Becket from Stokes. Stokes and Becket move into a room together, they get hit by a hallucination, and WHAM! Becket is in a completely different room on the opposite side of the school, and there's no door where Stokes was standing. Which makes you start wondering just how many doors you actually pass through that lead where they're supposed to go....
  • The third game pretty much confirms that Alma is warping reality, and its not even a conscious choice on her part. The developers even refer to it as the "Almaverse" and it features horrific monsters and living humans who are horribly twisted by Alma's psychic powers.
• The JRPG My World, My Way has something of a Reality Warper as the main character - a spoiled-rotten princess who becomes an adventurer, and can "pout" to change things (including locations, monsters, etc.) to her liking.
• Samus's Power Suit has a rather specific form of this, at least according to the description of this super-glitchy TAS of Metroid 2. Probably one of the few Hand Waves Played for Laughs in the history of fiction.
• In Eversion, you have the power to change the world around you at certain points in stages. This seems like an interesting power. And later you warp the Sugar Bowl into a Sugar Apocalypse.
• The first few Myst games revolve the concept of Rewriting Reality. Uru and Myst V brought this one step further by introducing the Bahro, an enslaved species with the power to warp reality among other untold abilities (ex.: Linking from one Age to another without the use of Linking Books, controlling the weather, and even accelerating time). It's possible that Yeesha might be able to do this as well.
• Any weirdness in Melty Blood involving maids, robots, cat girls, Attack of the 50 Foot Tsundere, and 10 year olds suddenly knowing Kung Fu gets blamed on the Tatari's Influence. ....despite that's not how the Tatari worked in the main plot!
• The Virage Embryo in Legend of Dragoon has this power: even when technically still dormant it warps the interior of the Moon That Never Sets into a series of elaborate constructs based on the memories of the main characters. During the final boss battle, with half of its power awakened, it takes on no less than four different forms while also transforming the arena into a moving recreation of the birth of the universe. And, of course, at full power it would have destroyed the world and remade it in it's own twisted image.
• The protagonist of The Company of Myself. Oh, wait, His Mind Just Made It Real For Him.
• Arguably Viki, from the Suikoden series. While her teleportation rune explains why she can send people to different places, and her general ditziness means this happens by accident or is done wrongly on occasion, it does not explain why she has the ability to travel through time, entirely by accident, usually after sneezing. In Suikoden III you can actually have two copies of her in your party because of this.
• Alf Layla wa-Layla from Sonic and The Secret Rings, as he tells you at the beginning of the fight:

"I AM...THE CREATOR...THE STORIES OF THIS WORLD ARE... MINE!"

• King Blue from Viewtiful Joe That's because he is Captain Blue, movie director extraordinaire and the creator of Movie Land
• Hemah in Fall From Heaven does this with dreams. Hemah himself is similar creation of a god's dreams.
• In Kirby's Epic Yarn, Kirby and Yin-Yarn have the power to alter the fabric of space.
• The villain Story Teller from the upcoming^[when?] crossover game, Professor Layton VS Ace Attorney, can literally rewrite reality with his magical book.
• While the "reality warping" is probably less literal, it is how a character in Mass Effect 2 described the corpse of a Reaper he was standing in at the time.
  • "A god — a real god — is a verb. Not some old man with magic powers. It's a force. It warps reality just by being there. It doesn't have to want to. It doesn't have to think about it. It just does."
• Sackboy in LittleBigPlanet.
• Sammun-Mak in Sam and Max: The Devil's Playhouse, who rewrites the history of the world to put himself in charge and make everyone love him. And possibly Max depending on whether you believe Papierwaite's or Sam's explanation as to why Max's insides look like a trendy 70s house - Papierwaite says it's this trope, Sam claims Max's insides have always looked like that.
• Xigbar from Kingdom Hearts II is given control over the power of "Space". During his boss fight he frequently teleports, changes the layout of the stage, and redirects the projectiles fired from his "arrowguns" at the player. He also seems to use his spacial manipulation to adhere himself to an non-existent surface, giving him the appearance of walking on an invisible ceiling.
• In Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates it's revealed that this is the principle on which all magic works. One cannot create a fire, but instead swap out the present universe for one that it is identical in all ways except the target being on fire. The number of possible universes are unbelievably vast, but still finite. The Starsingers on the other hand can choose from any universe at will, allow them to make changes far greater then normal magic users. In the end Yuri and Chelinka surpass even this, becoming true reality warpers capable of creating their own world from scratch.
• The Black Jewel from Wario World. The first thing it does upon being freed is destroy Wario's castle and create its own realm in it's place.
• In Alan Wake, any artist who creates works in and around Cauldron Lake can potentially do this. This includes Alan Wake himself, Thomas Zane, and it is implied that the Anderson brothers were capable of it as well.
• It turns out that the Von Braun's FTL drive in System Shock 2 works this way. This is also how SHODAN plans to remake the world according to her specifications.
• Dragons, Dovahkiin, and, to a lesser extent, those trained in the Thu'um are this in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The dragon tongue is such that a Shout can produce fire or ice, summon storms, and even slow time merely by speaking the effects into existence.

Webcomics

• Crazy Ghosts has Ghost, however in a twist he doesn't know that he has the power to alter reality so this ability is played more in line with Rule of Funny
  • Case and point http://crazyghosts.deviantart.com/gallery/?offset=96#/d34xd6y+
• In Books Don't Work Here The Author created the world and can change it at will. He has been seen to *poof* things into existence when he forgot to create them earlier. Interestingly enough the main character Robin has also learned to take advantage of the world’s malleable nature: changing character's names, pulling objects out of nowhere ,and even creating characters herself, though much of her control over the comic comes from bullying the narrator.
• Project 0 has most of the main heroes capable of this through the power of Modding
• Minus, a little girl with a very powerful imagination, is close to the 'ridiculously overpowered' end of the scale and definitely hits "really scaring in how she uses her powers sometimes". The comic is frightening because she has the thought patterns of a typical kid, and is surrounded by people who don't know that omnipotent ≠ the wisdom to use it responsibly. Sometimes she does realize how her actions hurt others and fixes then like when she accidentally killed a woman with a magic act and brought her back. However, plenty of other times she ends up ending/drastically altering the lives of people she crosses without thinking of it, like a man that yelled at her for popping his balloon whom she turned into a balloon and popped. She's also very open to the suggestions of others, and the strip actually ends when she takes a suggestion to bring back every living thing ever back to life, which wipes out all life on Earth due to the lack of space.
  • Of course, this is softened by the slightly bizarre place the series is in the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism. The most important thing is that while death isn't cheap, all it does is turn you into a ghost, which pretty much just means you have a spectral tail instead of a legs and can fly. It's noted that the aforementioned apocalypse isn't even that tragic, as everyone's pretty much continuing life as usual. The last half-dozen strips even include the regular kind of oddness back when everyone was alive.
  • After the comic ended, the author showed a series of gag/April Fools strips featuring an "evil Minus" who had the same power but was fearfully vindictive. The first example was possibly the most disturbing, where after a friend of hers accidentally steps on and ruins her sidewalk chalk painting (and apologizes when it's brought to her attention), Minus turns the friend into a chalk drawing and rubs out her face, complete with chalk blood. * Shudder*
• It's not overtly treated as an example of this trope, but in 8-Bit Theater Red Mage has been shown to alter reality by changing his character sheet. One time, he survived a fall from a great height by "forgetting" to record the damage he was supposed to have taken, and another time he survived having his skeleton removed because he judged it to be "wholly vestigial". On the sidelines, Black Belt once got himself so lost that he warped the fabric of space and accidentally created a clone of himself, while Thief stole his class change from the future.
  • Sarda the Sage a.k.a. The Wizard Who Did It, however, is a classic case of this trope. At one point he rewrote a character's speech bubbles, forcing him to agree with him. Why? Because he could. Also, there was never a fifth Light Warrior named "Bard"...
• Zimmy, from Gunnerkrigg Court, unfortunately has little control over her powers. She suffers from frightening hallucinations that become real if left untreated.
  • Smitty has a variation on this where he is able to warp reality, but only in ways that minimize entropy; as Parley puts it, his power is to "make everything boring." Throw a deck of cards, and he'll make them land in a perfect stack, arranged by suit and number. Try to play a video game with him, and the final prize will appear at his feet. And if you need something to land in a certain place, let him throw it and it will crash into a bird that appears out of nowhere, then fall onto the correct spot. He seems to have no idea how he does any of this. Also, he is cautious about "one way or another" side.
• The Author in Bob and George.
• Non-human example: the Files in Misfile can do this. They make people into fish.
• Axel gained this ability once he became an evil Buddhist god in Ansem Retort. However, Ansem believes the entire cast has this ability.
• In Homestuck, Becquerel, Jade's Guardian/Pet Big Badass Wolf demonstrates this ability during Jade's STRIFE battle.
  • And now^[when?] the stab-happy, omnicidal Jack Noir has the exact same power. Whoops.
    • And then Jade herself, after merging with her dreamself and Bec-prototyped sprite, and PM, after prototyping herself with WQ's ring.
  • Becquerel is actually a type of being known as a First Guardian, all of whom have the same abilities as him. Other First Guardians include Doc Scratch and GCat, with Scratch also being The Omniscient. And then there's Eldritch Abomination Lord English, who seemingly has First Guardian powers and Time Travel, potentially making him the most powerful character in the comic.
  • Also, the Sburb game beta itself: Normal video games don't alter the player's house nor make strange machines appear. Or create entire new universes.
• In Problem Sleuth, Pickle Inspector gains Reality Warper powers in the Imaginary World (which encompasses most of the world of the comic) due to his high imagination stat. At one point after gaining god-like powers from drinking liquid candy corn, he creates a bunch of duplicates of himself, one of which ascends to godhood and creates the universe.
• Holiday Emperor Bun-Bun from Sluggy Freelance. Also the wish-granting demons.
• Dan Shive of El Goonish Shive portrays himself as being able to alter the size, hair color, appearance, gender, and species of any of the characters that annoy him in a few of the sketchbook comics. On occasion, anyway.
• Deconstructed in this Wotch filler comic by the creator of City of Reality. After all, if reality was changed, wouldn't that be what's real to you now?
  • Not actually this trope, but the above question is hilariously explored at the end of Robert Sheckley's classic novel Mindswap.
• Crusader in Jayden and Crusader is the artist of the webcomic and, from time to time, he will use his powers to raise the dead, punish the wicked and generally save the world.
• A major part of A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe is that, since the beginning, the protagonist is able to spend CREATIVITY points (gained usually from killing enemies) to create any object (or creature) he wants, but also change objects, combine them together or imbue them with specific abilities. The more complicated an object is, the more CREATIVITY it costs though. Much later on, a fluid generated by the Stone Icosahedron grants the same abilities to anyone who drinks it.
  • By the end of the comic, the protagonist unlocks his full powers, thus gaining infinite CREATIVITY, allowing him to pull off truly spectacular stunts such as creating a gas giant solely to have its gravitational well divert a projectile off its course.
• In The Fancy Adventures of Jack Cannon, the hackers have this ability. How effective they are seems to depend on how quickly they can make complex coding.
• Everyone in Sylvan Migdal's Mnemesis (starts here) can concentrate and create objects out of nothing in the afterlife. More complicated constructs requires more thought and more people to work on it.

Web Original

• Homsar from Homestar Runner is such a Cloudcuckoolander that he defies the laws of physics, floating, shapeshifting, and even distorting the scenery.
  • Senor Cardgage recently completed his transformation into a second Homsar in hremail3184, in which he manages to walk in place as if the carpet had no friction and make ambient city sounds appear out of nowhere. Strong Bad put it best: "I'm ... quite scared right now."
  • AAAAAAAND The Paper might also qualify, subverting the laws of perspective.
  • Heck, even Strong Bad might qualify. Several things he's imagined have become real, including the future of his entire world. Oh, did I say "might qualify"? Because according to the official Homestar Runner FeedBurner page, it's canon.
• David Blaine in the "Street Magic" shorts, where he uses his powers in a Sarda-like Fashion to harass two Ambiguously Gay idiots, resulting in him giving a Zoolander-style look to the camera every time.
• The SCP Foundation has a number of SCP Objects that can do this.
  • Dr. Alto Clef once claimed he was a Reality Warper; he's made claim to several different backstories, although the most plausible one by far is that he's the Devil. However, he is the SCP's go-to guy for exterminating troublesome Reality Warpers.
  • There are enough reality warpers that the Foundation's rival Global Occult Coalition has an entire document with special instructions on how to kill them.
• In Freedom City Play By Post, Claremont Academy Mark 'Edge' Lucas is a powerful Reality Warper who's done things like cover the entire city in a helium balloon and blow up city blocks full of enemies. It's for the best that he was raised by a superhero, and naturally Genre Savvy.
• In the Whateley Universe, there are plenty of examples. None of them are near the A God Am I levels. Mages of varying power levels can alter bits of reality. Some devisers can build devises that can do it. And then there's a class of mutant powers known as Warper: some warpers can affect space or time or dimension, but none seem to be able to warp reality like a powerful wizard.
  • One example is Fractious, who can generate fractures and splits in reality. Normally, she can cut a weapon in half. When she gets upset, she can slice a car in half, or slice the facing off a building.
• During Spoony and Linkara's two part Adamantium Rage/Warrior # 1 review, Dr. Insano uses Warrior to screw up reality, causing it to reformat every five seconds. Literally, everytime it cuts back to Linkara and Spoony, the scene changes; one minute, they've switched characters, then another, Dr. Insano is reviewing the comic while Linkara has a gun pointed at his head, then another, neither of them can act, and on multiple occasions, different That Guy With The Glasses contributors are playing either Linkara or Insano. I could not possibly make this up.
  • The best one is the universe that features Linkara and Insano as stuffed animals.
• In the Paradise setting, a mysterious force is transforming humans into Funny Animals (and occasionally switching their gender as well). It turns out that The Virus responsible for the Change is not a biological virus, but rather a computer virus altering reality in a simulation running on a post-Singularity computronium computer.
• In the Global Guardians PBEM Universe there is Quantum, a who can manipulate matter and energy on the quantum level.
  • There is also Dagon, a sorcerer-cum-Eldritch Abomination who likes to change any area he's in to match H.P. Lovecraft's darkest nightmares.
• It's sometimes implied that one or both of the main characters in Chicken and Moose has this ability.
  • "Does everything I say just happen now?!"
• Tom Mallory, protagonist and narrator of the 1999 erotic story My Reward (NSFW!) by "Azil". After he frees an immensely powerful alien creature from imprisonment, it grants him literally godlike power over an area larger than the solar system as a reward. Afraid of accidentally altering the world and history into something utterly unrecognizable, Tom sets up an "interface" to prevent himself from making unconscious changes, and limits himself to temporary and/or local effects, mostly indulging his carnal desires.

Western Animation

• Goo from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends frequently lampshades, subverts, and deconstructs this trope. She's a little girl who can literally create life by accident. (And somehow she manages not to be too creepy.)
  • It should be noted that in this show anyone (at least children) can bring an imaginary friend into being. Goo gets special mention because she's the only kid we've met who runs the risk of doing it by accident. If you consider how it takes some imagination and focus to bring an imaginary friend to life (Terrence having to strain himself to create a red block with arms, though that's primarily just because it's Terrence), being able to bring dozens to life in detail within a few seconds makes Goo even more impressive.
  • Not to mention creating an entire army of them with diverse body types, powers, and personalities...while asleep.
  • The recent, and surprisingly psychological "Foster's Home" made for TV movie "Destination Imagination" gave us a glimpse of what happens when you cause a nigh-omnipotent-within-his-realm character to suffer from serious abandonment issues...
• Fairies in The Fairly OddParents have the ability to warp the world around them in response to the wishes of their charge.
  • As has the magical birthday cake.
  • But even fairies are bound by "Da Rules". The Magic Fairy-versary Muffin, granted to any child who lasts one year without revealing the existence of his or her fairy godparents, grants one (almost) rule-free wish per bite of muffin, on one condition: You can't wish for a better-tasting muffin. It tastes horrible. Deal with it.
  • One of Timmy's wishes enables Tom Saywer to escape from his book and enter other books, thereby altering the contents of other stories. Not the text of individual book copies, mind you, but the actual stories as they are remembered; A.J. got an F on his book report on Moby Dick (which he finished before the Reality Warp) because the titular whale that he wrote about no longer exists in the story. Don't think about it too hard.
    • As Tom Sawyer is about to take control of a physics textbook, Timmy realizes that this could allow him to change the very physics of the universe -- "He could turn gravity into gravy!" (Cut to an Imagine Spot with people on the street getting covered in 2 feet of gravy and then flying off the ground.)
• The Genie in Aladdin has phenomenal cosmic powers that are certainly far beyond that of any human sorcerer, but he does explicitly state three limitations to them. He cannot kill (directly), make someone fall in love, or bring the dead back to life. It's not quite clear if these are simply beyond the Genie's powers or if they are within his capability but are the only wishes he can refuse to grant; when telling Aladdin about these limitations he says that bringing the dead back to life "is not a pretty picture, I don't like doing it!", which suggests the latter.
  • The killing thing seems to be a direct impossibility, but as Genie!Jafar states, "You'd be surprised what you can live through."
• Basically any animated character that fits the classic description of "Toon," like the Looney Tunes, Screwy Squirrel, other Warner Bros. characters, and many of the Classic Disney Shorts characters.
• The Heckle and Jeckle cartoon The Power of Thought deconstructs this trope, as it applies to cartoons, for all it's worth. One of the two Magpies, realizing that they are cartoon characters, causes anything to happen just by thinking of it, and uses the power to bedevil a cop. The cop finally gets the two in jail by "doing some thinking of my own."
• Nosyarg Kcid, or "Larry", from the Teen Titans episode "Larry the Titan" (an homage to Bat-Mite, mentioned above).
  • And the show goes on to show what happens if a Reality Warper had a Phlebotinum Breakdown (All Robin's fault, Nice Job Breaking It, Hero).
  • And in a less over-the-top but still valid example, who could forget Melvin and her imaginary friend Bobby? Certainly not Monsieur Mallah.
  • Slightly more over the top is when Raven turns Titans Towers into a horror movie as a subconscious manifestation of her own fear. She never uses it again, but she certainly seems to have shade of it.
• Grim, and various other supernatural beings, in The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy.
• Some Ghosts in Danny Phantom. Notably, Desiree, a Genie-like ghost.
  • As well as anyone who wears the Reality Gauntlet.
• The Justice League Retro Universe in "Legends" was the product of a kid who idolized the Justice Guild and recreated them following their deaths in a nuclear war that also gave him mental powers.
• In Justice League Unlimited, Ace's power is initially driving victims mad with illusions. By her second appearance, her powers have increased to the point where her creations are very real.
• Pluma and the other Penna in "The Ghost of Paradise Estate" episode of My Little Pony are bird-spirits with this power. They'd easily be among the Ridiculously Overpowered Warpers if they (or the writers) were a little more imaginative.
  • More innocuous and harmless is Pinkie Pie's seeming ability to do this. Couple this with her default personality state, and you get the source of most of the "Uhhh... what?" comedy moments.
  • And most decidedly not innocuous, we have Discord, who has much in the way of Actor Allusion to another role of voice actor John DeLancie.^[1]
• From South Park: Butters... as long as he's in Imagination-Land, that is.
  • However, everyone could do that, it was pretty much a massive, pseudo-real lucid dream.
  • Kyle also briefly becomes one in the episode "Tooth Fairy Tats 2000," after suffering an existential crisis brought on by finding out the Tooth Fairy isn't real.
• Elyon Brown aka Queen Elyon of Meridian, and later Cornelia's little sister Lillian Hale in WITCH.
• Varla, the Barrier Maiden in the Dungeons and Dragons TV series.
• Alien X from Ben 10: Alien Force has this as his/her/its main ability. It's quite handy... but it only works if Ben and Alien X's two personalities can agree on what to do.
• A Halloween Episode by The Simpsons featured a parody of Twilight Zone's "It's A Good Life", "It's a Bart Life", where Bart is all-powerful. Everyone must bend to his every whim or suffer a Fate Worse Than Death. The USA is actually "Bonerland" due to his history exam (although that's more out of fear of reprisal than actually altering history.) Homer gets a nice monologue when he tries to KO Bart with a chair and remembers Bart is also a mind reader.
• Popeye is one of the biggest reality warpers of all time, and he does so by punching things. He's punched bulls into freshly cut steaks (with a sign and stand), people into baloney, Indians into nickels, etc, and even ripped through the very film he was on, the animators having to stop the cartoon so they could fix it.
• How else (apart from Toon Physics) can the Coyote's plans so frequently backfire in such mind-bending ways? The Road Runner's got to be one of these.
  • Indeed. At one point he defeats the Coyote by defying the law of gravity, which he explains by holding up a sign that says "Roadrunners don't study law!"
• Orson of U.S. Acres/Orson's Farm. He does need to be deliberately using his imagination, and a book helps, though. Either way, if it doesn't merely shut him off to the rest of the world, it superimposes his imagination on a fairly large acreage around him. Those affected need not have known he was reading; they can deduce it from the drastic changes in their surroundings. Reading a book about the ocean? Roy and Wade find themselves at the bottom. A coloring book? Whoops, now they're lineart. Reading "A Pictorial History of Trains", or even just the title? They get chased by a locomotive. But once he's done, it goes away. (If they were in the air, they might still have to fall back to the ground, though.)
• Dwayne, a Static Shock Bang Baby, was able to turn water into cherry soda and create fictional characters with his mind.
• Hexadecimal in ReBoot temporarily gains this power when she infects the system paint proram. She uses it to throw Mainframe into total chaos by disabling communications, melting all transport devices (including the bike Bob just bought), and changing the city's appearance beyond recognition. She even melts Glitch, shrinks Frisket, traps Enzo in a bunch of vidwindows, and cut+ pastes Phong Megabyte into Mainframes sky. Bob manages to fix all of this by getting Mike the TV to distract Hex while Bob finds the Undo Command on the system paint program.
• Fred from Coconut Fred's Fruit Salad Island.
• Futurama has Bender at the end of "Obsoletely Fabulous" although it's more of him warping his perception of reality.
  • Bender becomes a true reality warper during a later episode where he is overclocked by the Professor's son, Cubert.
• Ed from Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy. He can make an elevator made out of a bunch of random shit that goes to the moon. The exit is a microwave, and some of the stuff in the elevator includes a fishbowl, hockey sticks, and pretty much anything else you could get your hands on. He can also create a rewind button on Edd's hat.
  • He can also defy gravity, lift entire houses, blow up an entire house with nothing but the static electricity, clone himself to get an I-beam brought up to the top of the aforementioned elevator, jump at least a thousand feet up in the air, is invulnerable to pain, and can exist in cartoons. When you consider all this, it's little wonder that he almost destroyed reality itself in 2+2=Ed.
• Jimmy Two-Shoes: According to Word of God, Lucius can remake Miseryville on a whim, which is the reason for all the strange things that occur. The reason he doesn't do it obviously is because his Pride would be damaged if he admitted he needed his powers.
• It's never said, but occasionally hinted, that some of Phineas and Ferb‍'‍s gadgetry borders on this. Particularly the times when it's lampshaded that what they're trying to do is impossible, right before they go and do it anyway.
  • And how much they can accomplish in the course of a single day lends some credence to the idea.
• Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "The Magicks of Megas-Tu". They can bring anything into existence with but a thought. While they were on Earth they were considered to be witches and magicians due to their powers.
• Belladonna from All Dogs Go to Heaven The Series is a low level one. She was able to teleport most of the cast into a board game (which became a world of it's own) with just a snap of her fingers and this is probably how her Villain Song even makes sense at all (it involved dancing meat). However, it seems she can't directly effect someone's freewill or won't.
• On the Adventure Time episode "Rainy Day Daydream", everything that Jake imagines becomes real. Finn then has to go through a bunch of obstacles created by Jake to turn off his imagination.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Pinkie Pie, although her powers aren't meant to be taken literally.
  • The fandom seems to somewhat take it seriously, especially since Pinkie seems to have just about obliterated the fourth wall.
  • A more malevolent example is Discord, who uses his powers to cause chaos for the sake of his own amusement. And unlike Pinkie Pie, his powers are not Played for Laughs. Discord has been compared to Emperor Joker (see Comics) in that he's willing and able to singlehandedly bring about a World Gone Mad.
• Roger of American Dad is a bit of a subtle reality warper. Whenever he comes up with a backstory for one of his personas, logic bends to his will to make those backstories true. This includes being the birth mother of two fully grown men, and also being the teenage birth son of a human family, complete with pictures of him growing up!

Real Life

• In a Lucid Dream, a person that's dreaming is aware of being in a dream. This often has the side effect of giving the dreamer control over the dream world, making them a Reality Warper within the context of the dream.

1. ↑ The other role being Q from Star Trek