You’ve seen it before and you groaned with incredulity.

Nick Wheeler via Comp­fight

Deus ex machina, also known as Plot Armor is a term used to describe instances in fic­tion where a char­ac­ter should be killed or severely injured or steeped in deep awful­ness but some­thing dra­matic hap­pens to pre­vent that.

Sev­eral instances from Harry Pot­ter come to mind.  I won’t relate the entirety of these sto­ries but let me throw a few terms out there.  If you’ve read the books or seen the movies you’ll know exactly what I mean.

1. Gilly­weed (Harry Pot­ter and the Gob­let of Fire)
2. Firenze, the cen­taur (Harry Pot­ter and the Philosopher’s Stone)
3. Fawks, the sort­ing hat, the sword of Gryffindor (Harry Pot­ter and the Cham­ber of Secrets)
4. invis­i­bil­ity cloak
5. Time-Turner (Harry Pot­ter and the Pris­oner of Azkarban)
6. Harry’s own patronus (Harry Pot­ter and the Pris­oner of Azkarban)
7. Buck­beak (Harry Pot­ter and the Pris­oner of Azkarban)

I could go on.  Allow me to add as well that Hermione Granger is one big walk­ing breath­ing exam­ple of plot armor.  If not for her quick think­ing and intel­li­gence Harry and Ron would have been splat before the sec­ond book was written.

But I digress…a little.

Plot armor, while it makes us groan with exas­per­a­tion, is a nec­es­sary ele­ment in fic­tion and with­out it I think many of our favorite tales would lose their verve and inter­est.  But it must be done well.  We need to see our char­ac­ters in tough, seem­ingly impos­si­ble sit­u­a­tions, but we also don’t want them to die, or be oth­er­wise put out of com­mis­sion.  I mean, how awe­some was it when Tree­beard the Ent stomped on the Orc and saved Frodo and Sam just when we were begin­ning to think that all was lost?  We loved that and I’d wager none of you grum­bled and rolled your eyes at the pre­pos­ter­ous­ness of it all.  You didn’t, because it was great.  It was done well.

We relate to char­ac­ters we like most and see­ing them extri­cate them­selves from bad sit­u­a­tions, even if amaz­ingly unlikely, gives us hope.  I can think back to many sit­u­a­tions in my own life where I’ve man­aged to shimmy out of a chal­lenge that seemed insur­mount­able.  I look back and think, that wasn’t my doing.  That was divine inter­ven­tion.  That was God’s hand.

Plot armor can def­i­nitely be done wrong.  In this instance, I believe bad plot armor speaks to a weak­ness in the entirety of the tale.  The writer or film­maker didn’t do a good job con­vinc­ing us to sus­pend dis­be­lief.  If you can con­vince an audi­ence to throw out the laws of real­ity for the dura­tion of the story, you can intro­duce amaz­ing saves with­out incit­ing dis­gust or dri­ving away the audi­ence altogether.

Can you think of instances of plot armor in your favorite or least favorite stories?

Do you uti­lize this plot device in your writing?

Tell me something.

This site gives in depth exam­ples of Plot Armor in some our favorite sto­ries: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor