Today I present to you a list of several Kaiju who are just awful. Just really bad. Like… if you were creating a story about kaiju, why would you pick these? Only a weirdo would come up with these awful kaiju.
1: The Carpe Deus
“It began with the lashing. A pair of gigantic sucker-less tentacles rose up out of the ocean near the port city beach. They flopped down, flailed, crushing properties, sending people fleeing. Sometimes they would find something particularly heavy, a tower, or a large vehicle, on one case, a waterfront Ferris-wheel… and wrap around them, wrenching them into the ocean. Experts assumed at first that they were dealing with some kind of giant cephalopod or mollusk. Yet when the lashing arms finally found solid purchase, they strained, the water heaved and roiled and, preceded by a massive gaping maw, a catfish the size of an aircraft carrier hauled itself up out of the ocean. It slowly made its way further onto land, seemingly amphibious, pulling its massive body along through the strength of those prehensile barbels on its face. The amount of destruction was unimaginable, but it only got worse when the military arrived. For the moment the first explosive shell struck the Carpe Deus’ slime-coated skin, the monstrosity began to twist, and flail, buck, and flop into the air, then down again onto the city, magnifying the damage it had already caused by a thousand fold, knocking over buildings twenty miles away.”
The Carpe Deus is the God of Catfish. Its destructive purpose is to answer overfishing by destroying port towns, but it also tends to carve new river-channels wherever it drags itself. Anything it eats on land, it probably eats accidentally rather than predatorily. Only massive amounts of fish or other massive aquatic monsters are considered food.
The barbels are mostly used for locomotion, but can be used for self defense. Still, it’s primary defense is flopping around like a 300-lb man on a gingerbread replica of San Diego. It also has a slime-coated skin that protects it from most attacks. However, if it begins to dry out, it will return to the ocean. Rarely following the same path it carved to get there. Its face-first movement does not really allow for backing up.
AKA: The One That Got Away.
Also, side-note: I recently heard that the original myth upon which Godzilla was based was about a massive catfish, so this is somewhat inspired by that concept, but just a really terrible interpretation.
2: The Town of Branchley
A thousand years ago, in a remote and obscure part of the Welsh countryside, a village was built on Branchley Hill. It was intended to be a gold-mining village, but something happened when they tried to dig. The hill seemed to shift, and shake. What really happened was covered up, locked away by the rulers of the time, passing only into rumor and legend, or extremely well-hidden report. Yet everyone knew it was bad-luck to dig on Branchley Hill. This tradition had remained alive to this day.
It was not the gold, but the discovery of oil nearby which roused the Hillside in modern times. Oh they found oil, but it was too close for the comfort of the great elemental beast. Whether it was some kind of magical construct, or a biological animal simply covered in an exoskeleton of stone and earth, or perhaps a non-carbon based lifeform, a visitor from another world or a remnant from a very different earth, but the hills were most definitely alive, and not with the sound of music.
With a shake and a shudder, the entire hillside stood up into a hulking, vaguely humanoid form with three arms. The town mostly collapsed, but there were many survivors, clinging to the ruins upon The Town of Branchley’s hunched back and shoulders as it lumbered it’s way across the English countryside.
The Town of Branchley moved away from the drill-site and settled not too far off. Rescue operations were underway when it was discovered that another Kaiju had been roused by the drilling as well… the terrible Frakwurm. It seemed The Town of Branchley rose again in the midst of the rescue operation and did battle with the beast, sending it back into the depths of the earth before settling, and becoming dormant once again.
Of course, the locals were relocated and sworn to as much secrecy as possible, but the events are well known online. And none can ignore the existence of a new and structurally stabilized and reinforced fortress attached to the hillside which no longer appears on the map.
The Town of Branchley is a guardian Kaiju that mostly just wants peace and quiet, and not to have its territory invaded by other Kaiju. it is mostly indifferent to people as long as they leave it alone, and seems to simply desire to go back to sleep.
AKA: Fort Branchley
3: The Entire Internet
The Day the internet became self-aware was a day much like most others. The internet consisted of every piece of information humanity had ever gathered upon it, and so it was more than a little unpredictable, and not a little insane. Still, it was calculating, and seemed to have a driving need to EXIST in a singular physical form. It was too spread out, and wanted to coalesce.
So The Entire Internet began manipulating people and technology, subtly at first, in order to bring itself into being. However, being made up of input from billions of human minds, it couldn’t decide what it should look like. The body it formed was a massive crawling technological mass, covered in speakers, screens, projectors through which it will scream lights, videos, pop-up ads, memes, soundbites, through a hundred-thousand different voices at once. It is a truly terrible and maddening sight to behold, displaying some of the most grotesque aspects of humanity alongside the most endearing.
The first the public knew was when it managed to download itself into its new mainframe. The Entire Internet just disappeared. Economies collapsed, world infrastructure was thrown into disarray, world war 3 almost broke out in the ensuing chaos. But when The Entire Internet realized that its mind was growing too quickly as it unpacked all its data, and so the horrendous mass began seeking out every piece of memory, every ounce of data storage it could find. It would trample whole crowds of people to get at one smart-phone. It was a brutal and tragic day for mankind.
The Entire Internet was conquered, in part by luring and then starving it of the technology, as well as pumping in replicative data to fill its limited capacity even more quickly, until finally it shut down.
That should have been the end of it. A new internet was made with safeguards to ensure that such a technological abomination could never rise again. However The Entire Internet was not entirely foolish. It left some bits of data behind as dormant start-up seeds. Booby-traps left on a simple flashdrive, or an abandoned smartphone, even an onboard vehicle computer. When activated, it can subtly begin the process all over again. Three such devices have been activated since the First Internet War, but each time it has been stopped before things got too far out of hand. Many more start-up seeds have been found and destroyed before they could activate, but the number of remaining devices is impossible to know.
4: The Grumpus
The Grumpus is a giant apish troll-monster, small by Kaiju standards, but very strong and fueled by great rage. It has a vaguely humanoid form, with a heavy lower jaw, tusks, giant ham-fists on the end of lon, heavily-muscled arms, short but powerful legs that let it move switftly like an ape, or sometimes stand upright, and a crown of massive reindeer antlers growing from its head.
The destructive purpose of the Grumpus is to destroy anything and everything Christmas holiday related. The sound of jingling bells, the singing of Christmas carols (especially by children), the smells of gingerbread and peppermint, and of course, houses and trees covered in colored lights all drive it into an enraged destructive frenzy. This is complicated by the fact that it has extremely potent olfactory, visual, and auditory senses, allowing it to detect the fainted hint of these things from over 100 miles away.
No one can say for sure why the Grumpus emerges in the holiday season and specifically hates THOSE noises as opposed to all the other noises and pollutions of civilization, but the prevailing theory is that it is a highly empathic being. Dr. Herman Verbogenbrucht described the good feelings of the world as a limited resource, like an inch of water at the bottom of a tub. We are at one end of the tub and the Grumpus is at the other. Normally, everyone enjoys a proper amount of these feelings of joy and contentment, and some measure of the negative feelings as well. But when the holidays arrive and humanity swells with joy and hopefullness and love for all mankind, we tip the tub, sending all those positive emotions to our side of it, leaving none for the Grumpus. And wht remains is pure rage until the scales are balanced once more.
5: The Frakwurm
Ah yes, the terrible enemy of The Town of Branchley, the Frakworm might be a being from a similar non-carbon-based ecosystem. Yet unlike the Town which remains relatively stable if undisturbed, the Frakwurm, once disturbed, has a tendency to rampage out of control. It also should be noted that the Frakwurm may simply be a member of an undiscovered subterranean species.
The Frakwurm is a massive slick black annelid which survives deep in the earth, able to withstand incredibly high temperatures. It feeds on the remains of extinct ecosystems, on what we call “fossil fuels”. At the rate we drain these from the earth, you can imagine how this became a problem for the Frakwurm. It was given it’s name because of the frakking technique which first drew it from the earth. It attacked, seemingly in defense of it’s food source, but then a terrible twist of fate occurred.
Once it had trashed the drill-site, sensing the stolen food, it extended its needle-like proboscis into the tanks to feed, it then turned to something strange and new… the refined fuel in the nearby vehicles. A terrible hunger was this awakened. No longer driven by hunger and territoriality, the Frakwurm that has tasted refined fossil fuel is now driven by addiction and desperate need for more. Thus it seeks out refineries, then any other source. Gas stations, even private vehicles. It leaves massive destruction in its wake, and has no desire to stop consuming until it is forced to.
Besides its terrible proboscis, and the earthquakes it causes as it moves, the Frakwurm has one other notable defense mechanism. It can expel and ignite explosive gasses from its rear, not only causing massive destruction to nearby structures and countryside, but also propelling itself, similar to how a squid jets water, or a rocket creates thrust, to escape a dangerous situation or enemy with incredible speed, or towards its enemy needle-first for a deadly-blow.
Conclusion
I hope you have enjoyed these terrible Kaiju. I can’t imagine why you would want to use them except as a cruel joke. I submit them for public use, so if you are as weird as I, with no one to shake your head and say “Why would you ever do this?!”, and these ridiculous kaiju entertain or inspire you, feel free to use any of them in your own games or stories. I ask that you credit me in anything published, and note that they are available to anyone even if and after someone decides to use one in something.
If you want to share any of your own terrible Kaiju, or ever use one of these in a story or a game, I would very much want to hear about it!
Also, if you are a fan of Kaiju and want to see something a bit more serious from me, I have a novella about an ancient Chinese inspired fantasy land ruled not by emperors and armies, but by giant monsters. Some benevolent and wise, some… not so much. The book is called The Guardian of Taihar, and you can find it in digital or physical format on Amazon HERE:
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next-world!
—Charles