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What is 'plot armor'?


aceluby

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How some characters are kept alive because the author wants to keep them alive (like how Tyrion probably wouldn't survive the Battle of the Green Fork in real life). I've never really cared about it, everything is done so the story goes where the author wants it to go.


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My understanding: All the random and seemingly impossible events that happen that are contrary to the way the story normally works and take place to keep a certain character alive where almost any other character in the same situation would have died. Its kind of like the GRRM Deus Ex Machina.


Im sure people will provide great examples I'm blanking on them at the moment.


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How some characters are kept alive because the author wants to keep them alive (like how Tyrion probably wouldn't survive the Battle of the Green Fork in real life). I've never really cared about it, everything is done so the story goes where the author wants it to go.

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The notion that some characters are too important to the plot to be discarded, and are therefore seen as not as vulnerable as other characters. The plot is their armour - they are needed to serve it.



For example, Dany has plot armour at the moment, because we can be pretty sure she will be involved with a Dance of the Dragons. So whatever happens with her current Dothraki showdown, we kind of know she won't die just yet.


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If you are watching a heist movie, and somebody says they need the Safe Cracker to open the store/bank/museum's safe or the heist is pointless... you know nothing is going to happen to the Safe Cracker, because otherwise there is would be no movie. So, if the Safe Cracker has a bad heart, you KNOW he won't die of a heart attack. If somebody hold a gun to the Safe Cracker, the armed man will be talked down, miss, or otherwise not endager the guy who needs to stay alive to move the plot. Of course, towards the end all bets are off.



So, in literature, it is a very crude way of saying a character can't die because he needs to move along the plot. For example, despite the dangerous situations Harry Potter found himself in, did the reader ever really expect him to die? Well, maybe in the last book. Did he die in the last book? I should probably have picked an example I actually read. Regardless, no Harry Potter, no Harry Potter franchise. Harry Potter has plot armor. Realistically, one of those villains (or was it the same villain?) should have killed him by sheer luck.



Still, sometimes readers can incorrectly assign plot armor to characters.


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It's how different characters suffer( or not) different consequences for their actions or how certain aspects of logic apply( or not) in different ways. For example, dragons are seem as a wonder, rare and priceless, but nobody of power tries to forcibly get them for themselves. Or how Valyrian steel weapons are seem as a symbol and pride of the families that possess them, but some are given away despite that. Or how someone with several physical limitations suddenly suffer none of them in combat situation.


The term sometimes is overused(like mary sue), and it's always a relation between characters, for someone to have it, that means others that clearly don't.


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Jon at queenstown refusing to kill the old man is a prime example of plot armor. He should of died but the seemingly impossible happened, i.e summer

But that example provides Jon with information about Bran that he could not have ascertained in another way...

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