“Can you believe it, I’m having the
dumbest luck right now.”
In fiction, the concept of plot armor is often debated. While some consider it necessary to keep their characters alive and progress the story, others argue that it breaks the immersion and makes the story feel unrealistic. My personal opinion is that it isn’t a question of whether to use plot armor or not, but just one of knowing when to use it and how to use it in the right way.
ARTICLE
What Plot Armor is
In simple terms, plot armor is when a character survives a dangerous situation or escapes death due to seemingly impossible circumstances. It is a term used to describe a character’s ability to survive in situations where they should have perished. For example, a character might escape a burning building without a scratch or make it out of an all-out gunfight not hit once.
The use of plot armor is often criticized by readers as it can feel like a cheap way to keep a character alive. When used excessively, it can undermine the tension and stakes of the story and make it feel less believable. However, there are times when plot armor is necessary, keeping the relevant characters alive so that the story can happen.
If used in moderation, it can also create moments of surprise and add to the tension of a scene. For example, a character may narrowly escape death, only to be left with severe injuries that will impact the rest of the story. So how can we make use of plot armor? Note, this post is alive and gets added to and altered the more I learn about this topic. Your suggestions and additions are always welcome. Thank you.
How to Do Plot Armor right?
Follow Internal Logic of the World
Suspend disbelief is when a reader gives you permission to lie to them and tell them something that is not true. No such thing as Dragons – remember? Now let’s not remember and instead pretend that they are real – at least for a little while. The problem isn’t that readers mind unrealistic or fantastical things to happen, they mind if it doesn’t “feel real”. We don’t have a problem believing that there is a dragon in your story, but we mind the idea that a mere sword is enough to get through its thick, fictional, skin. If they have no problem with the dragon, why hone in on the details of its skin composure? Because the point is to make it feel like it could be real. Fiction is an escape, the more detailed the fantasy you conjure up, the easier for your reader to get lost in your world. We say that what we’re doing is entertain. But actually, it’s a bit larger than that, well the ideal is. What you’re actually trying to do is to help your reader forget themselves, unburden them from their own consciousness and their own reality, and let them experience a different one. You know the “flow”-state? That state where you are so focused on your work, practice, etc. that you are completely absorbed. Where time flies by and there is no future or past, no distracting thoughts but just the right now, what you are doing at this moment. For us to get into a flow state one of the key ingredients is to turn off our critical thinking. It’s the same with readers. To get fully absorbed into your story they need to be able to turn off their critical thinking. This doesn’t work if instances of plot armor light up the critical part of their brains all throughout the experience. This is where we come back to it not feeling right. Usually, if the story is very engaging, we don’t spot plot holes or armor while reading a story. If the story is thrilling enough, the characters interesting enough, it takes some obvious plot armor to rip us out of the experience. But afterward, when we absorb the story and start to think through its different parts, that is when we realize why it feels off. That’s when we can put our finger on it and say “No way the character would get out of that situation unharmed”. And we know that even if we have never been in a gunfight ourselves because we have seen the real-life consequences of gunfights in the news, documentaries ormore realistic stories. So, your job is to present unrealistic situations in a way that makes the reader think they could happen like that. If you’re going to have a dragon, the best way to convince the reader of that fact is to show its skin up close.
All of this plays into the concept of internal and external story logic. Internal logic means that what happens in the story is believable in the setting of the world. In this world that your story plays in having dragons is completely believable, no one there questions that they can exist because in the story they do. External logic is our real life reference point, what is possible in the real world. And in absence of explanation or consistency, the reader will refer to external logic. So if you established within the story that your dragon is formidable enough to burn down a whole castle and everyone within, your character manages to dodge getting roasted by ducking behind a pillar of rocks, that is plot armor. And if early on in the story to establish just how outmatched the humans are, you have seemingly every character no matter how trained or smart immediately perish against the monster, the untrained 15-year-old protagonist surviving encounter after encounter starts to feel like plot armor. Because it starts to feel more and more impossible in reference to the internal logic that you taught them about your world earlier.
All of this means, readers are more than happy to suspend their disbelief and you are allowed to use plot armor for your characters, but that plot armor shouldn’t go directly against what you thought them about your world and how it works. Our 15-year-old protagonist may have survived so far because other characters sacrificed themselves for him, because he is secretly special and doesn’t know it yet, or, because he has accidentally stumbled upon a weakness the monster has and that has kept him safe so far. This brings us right to the next point.
Be Specific
The second part of doing plot armor right, get ahead of objections. So, your protagonist gets out of the gunfight mostly unharmed because for the rest of the story you still need them and their limbs fully intact. But realistically speaking, it is highly unlikely for anyone to live through such a situation and be almost unharmed. So what do you do? You find a realistic explanation for why the character is unharmed. See, now the outcome is unrealistic (dragon) but how you sell it is realistic (skin composure). And your reader is still with you. So to sum up, how to do plot armor right? Detailed Explanations. You need the sword to pierce the dragon’s thick skin even though nothing else has made a dent so far? Easy, you set up early on how an arrow shot at the dragon years earlier has dislodged the scale that was covering the heart (the Hobbit). And just like that what would have ripped your reader out of your story becomes the very thing they are rooting for to happen.
Plot Armor Makes Things Worse
Plot armor is similar to coincidences. Coincidences that solve a characters problems are cheating and no reader likes those. But coincidences that make things worse for the character are great because they increase conflict and stakes. With plot armor, this works too. Plot armor that keeps your character save from harm, cheating. But plot armor that keeps the antagonist save from harm and therefore makes things so much worse for the protagonist, now that is great.
An example of this is in Attack on Titan, for a large part of the story, Reiner. How many times did our protagonists try to kill him and how many times, true to his titan power, did plot armor keep him around? I remember vividly each time when I was rooting for him to be killed and yet somehow he still managed to survive (He survived a direct attack from Levi after all, how is that not plot armor?). And each time he failed to die I was annoyed and frustrated with the characters for failing to kill him, but never with the author. Because that is what good story telling does, it makes you so invested in the story that you feel the same frustrations as the characters do, and at the same time adore the storytelling for being able to create such strong emotions in you.
So there are two ways we can use this, either if the protagonist gets plot armor look for ways how avoiding harm in a situation could turn out worse for the character. For example, the character made it out of the gunfight unharmed but one of the side characters didn’t and because it was the protagonist who got the side character in to it, there is all that survivors guilt or their relationship is now ruined.
And the second is to use plot armor for antagonists or characters that are directly working against your protagonists and as a result, achieving their goal becomes less likely.
Embrace Imperfection
What if you have a situation in your story where you absolutely can’t find a way to make plot armor seem legitimate? Leave it. Nothing is perfect. If you’ve managed to cleanse out the worst cases of plot armor, for balance sake, leave it in. Readers need to have something to complain about after all.
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