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What's the most blatant Deus Ex Machina you've seen? [Possible Spoilers]


bradd

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Hiya :)

So I finally got around to reading the Dresden Files, and although it's an awesome series, there's a bit of a :bang: moment in Death Masks (Book 5)...

What the fuck is up with Ebenezar nuking Ortega's villa? Half the book is Harry talking about the duel between him and Ortega, then after that goes sour, Ebenezar sends a freaking meteor at his house and takes him out. Why not do that earlier on? Kinda convenient that the uber baddy is now no longer a factor and Dresden didn't have to actually do anything about it...

What's the worst/most blatant Deus Ex Machina you've ever read?

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Biggest DEM moment ever is one that every reader of Steven Erikson's Malazan Book Of The Fallen should know about, namely the one in the very first damn book...

The Azath House grows out of the ground and eats the Jaghut Tyrant right as it's about to kill, like, everyone.

C'mon Erikson, that's weaksauce.

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Stephen Baxter's Exultant didn't impress me much so I may be biased, but the way it resolved the climax by

calling off an attack on the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milkway at the last moment because someone blurted out something about the Platonic Forms possibly residing there

with absolutely no build-up or foregrounding annoyed me no end.

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Hiya :) So I finally got around to reading the Dresden Files, and although it's an awesome series, there's a bit of a :bang: moment in Death Masks (Book 5)...

What the fuck is up with Ebenezar nuking Ortega's villa? Half the book is Harry talking about the duel between him and Ortega, then after that goes sour, Ebenezar sends a freaking meteor at his house and takes him out. Why not do that earlier on? Kinda convenient that the uber baddy is now no longer a factor and Dresden didn't have to actually do anything about it...

What's the worst/most blatant Deus Ex Machina you've ever read?

That's not a Deus Ex Machina. The conflict was already resolved when McCoy did that.

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That's not a Deus Ex Machina. The conflict was already resolved when McCoy did that.

Ortega was wounded but escaped. He still had every intent to kill Dresden. Ergo, conflict not resolved. Yup, there's reasons why McCoy did it which become evident in later books but it's still textbook DEM.

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Biggest DEM moment ever is one that every reader of Steven Erikson's Malazan Book Of The Fallen should know about, namely the one in the very first damn book...

The Azath House grows out of the ground and eats the Jaghut Tyrant right as it's about to kill, like, everyone. C'mon Erikson, that's weaksauce.

YMMV may vary on the exact definition of DEM. For me, it is something that has had no forshadowing, no mention of previously at all and no logical reason why it should be happening. The author has written is such a way that there is no way they can make the plot go where they want smoothly, so instead of the huge amount of work involved in writing again well, they pull it out of their ass.

In that context, I disagree with your example

the Azath house had been growing for half the book, and was actually a major plot thread

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Neither the Dresden Files example or the Erikson one are really DEM.

The Erikson one can be considered one a little I guess but that's just due to his world not being explored at all in the first book. The Azath play a huge role in the series and are very much an explained phenomenon starting as soon as the second book.

And the fact there are more powerful people than Dresden in the series is not DEM, the White council is explained as being ridiculously powerful throughout the entire series. There is nothing that is not established about Eb's power.

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AIVAS.

Thanks, Ms McCaffrey. A whole series of books about the sociological ramifications of time-travelling telepathic dragons bred to combat a mindless alien threat? Is not made better by having your characters suddenly dig up a computer that tells them how to make space suits and shoot stray planets out of orbit, before conveniently expiring.

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Ortega was wounded but escaped. He still had every intent to kill Dresden. Ergo, conflict not resolved. Yup, there's reasons why McCoy did it which become evident in later books but it's still textbook DEM.

Not really. Ortega loses to Dresden in the duel that the book has been building up to and flees to his home. He could have been a recurring villain with a hate-on for Dresden, like Mavra is, but Butcher chose not to go that route. Instead he has McCoy wipe him out in an act of badassness. If I'm recalling correctly, we already knew that McCoy was the uber assassin of the wizard world. His being able to take out Ortega isn't a shocker (though the means is fun). The important thing is that Dresden won the conflict on his own merits. If Butcher had wanted to it would have been easy to have Dresden kill Ortega then and there with little change to the overall story. McCoy's tactical strike doesn't occur to fix an intractable problem in the narrative, it's there to further the story lines and establish his credentials.

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If I'm recalling correctly, we already knew that McCoy was the uber assassin of the wizard world.

In fact we didn't and the Ortega incident is, rather than a DEM, laying the groundwork for that revelation later so it doesn't come out of nowhere.

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YMMV may vary on the exact definition of DEM. For me, it is something that has had no forshadowing, no mention of previously at all and no logical reason why it should be happening. The author has written is such a way that there is no way they can make the plot go where they want smoothly, so instead of the huge amount of work involved in writing again well, they pull it out of their ass. In that context, I disagree with your example

the Azath house had been growing for half the book, and was actually a major plot thread

Yeah, there's clearly some buildup to it, but we don't know what it is or what it can do so it comes out of left field when it just saves the day at the end. So it doesn't fit your first two criteria, but I'd say it fits the third rather well. If it's not a DEM technically, then I'd say it's a pretty damn close spiritual successor to the title.

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Yeah, there's clearly some buildup to it, but we don't know what it is or what it can do so it comes out of left field when it just saves the day at the end. So it doesn't fit your first two criteria, but I'd say it fits the third rather well. If it's not a DEM technically, then I'd say it's a pretty damn close spiritual successor to the title.

well, true we do not know exactly what it will do, but we do know that it is a weird very powerful thing, that is going to do something weird and powerful. I agree that it was a very abrupt and for me dissapointing end to something that had been built up and built up, but in my mind that does not make it a DEM

But I may be alone in my definition! I remember being drawn in to a discussion about the use of DEM in Robin Hobbs Farseer

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Warren Ellis's Gravel. Magic has no system and always solves whatever problem the plot presents. The intervening panels between plot and resolution end up being little more than filler, despite the supposed gritty, UF feel.

Also, see Yu-gi-Oh. ;-)

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My Sister's [EXPLETIVE] Keeper by Jodi Picoult.

eta: Which I really did love until the last few pages' "resolution" made me want to kick squirrels.

eta2: And which I would still sort of recommend kind of.

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Here's the thing. Now, I've not read any of the explicit examples above but ... if the deus ex is _that_ blatant, doesn't it seem reasonable to think that the author, whose business after all is the putting together of stories, has also noticed? And if they have noticed, do we really think it was beyond them to engineer a solution not requiring deus ex? I wonder if perhaps it's simply that authors just want to recognise that at the end of it all sometimes things work out because of dumb luck, because of some timely convenience that just landed in a lap? Maybe they want to recognise that in life despite cleverness and despite planning sometimes that's not enough and the only reason the person telling you about it _has_ a story to tell is because things fell into place?

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Here's the thing. Now, I've not read any of the explicit examples above but ... if the deus ex is _that_ blatant, doesn't it seem reasonable to think that the author, whose business after all is the putting together of stories, has also noticed? And if they have noticed, do we really think it was beyond them to engineer a solution not requiring deus ex? I wonder if perhaps it's simply that authors just want to recognise that at the end of it all sometimes things work out because of dumb luck, because of some timely convenience that just landed in a lap? Maybe they want to recognise that in life despite cleverness and despite planning sometimes that's not enough and the only reason the person telling you about it _has_ a story to tell is because things fell into place?

i mean, possibly, but unless that's been an ongoing theme present throughout the work, i'm more likely to thin that author just couldn't come up with anything better.

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i mean, possibly, but unless that's been an ongoing theme present throughout the work, i'm more likely to thin that author just couldn't come up with anything better.

Yeah, same here for the most part. Also, I think it also depends on how much dramatic tension is built up regarding the ability of the character to find a solution.

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YMMV may vary on the exact definition of DEM. For me, it is something that has had no forshadowing, no mention of previously at all and no logical reason why it should be happening. The author has written is such a way that there is no way they can make the plot go where they want smoothly, so instead of the huge amount of work involved in writing again well, they pull it out of their ass. In that context, I disagree with your example

the Azath house had been growing for half the book, and was actually a major plot thread

This definition is WAY too restrictive. Many textbook Deus Ex Machina endings would fail this test since, e.g., Euripides' plays often mention/foreshadow the god's resolution. But the plot was still insoluble till that god was literally lowered in the crane to provide the deus ex machina ending. For example, I the ending to the Nights Dawn trilogy is deus ex machina, but fails your test (I recognize that some people strongly feel the ending was not deus ex machina, but meh, they're trying to hard. Doesn't make the ending per se bad).

Here's the thing. Now, I've not read any of the explicit examples above but ... if the deus ex is _that_ blatant, doesn't it seem reasonable to think that the author, whose business after all is the putting together of stories, has also noticed? And if they have noticed, do we really think it was beyond them to engineer a solution not requiring deus ex? I wonder if perhaps it's simply that authors just want to recognise that at the end of it all sometimes things work out because of dumb luck, because of some timely convenience that just landed in a lap? Maybe they want to recognise that in life despite cleverness and despite planning sometimes that's not enough and the only reason the person telling you about it _has_ a story to tell is because things fell into place?
I can get behind this, but want to point out that it's funny coming from you as there is a pretty lucky moment for the protagonist at the end of Prince of Thorns. :P
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