On plot armor

Ok yes. Plot armor in general is considered a mistake. With good reason. Enough plot armor and there are no stakes left in your plot, and the audience isn't worried your plot-armored characters may not make it. And if there's no suspense, there's no engagement or the engagement you get may not be what you were shooting for.


You don't want your audience to react this way when you're telling them to be afraid for the characters.

But let's be real here. Every story has plot armor within the character buildup. Even the ones that chop of character heads early on.


You were expecting a GoT gif here weren't you.

What I mean to say is that even in stories where the author genuinely invests in stripping plot armor from their characters, there is some level of protection from death (or whatever stakes there are) until it is the appropriate dramatic or pacing or plot development time to allow the (thin or not) armor to fail.


She could have died several times already, but this is when it happens

The secret isn't on whether plot armor exists, but on how well it is camouflaged by the character design as well as the circumstances. All it takes for plot armor to be invisible is for that suspension of disbelief to hold that death could plausibly have been avoided in a particular instance.

And that varies from setting to setting and plot to plot. A larger than life adventure can hide thicker plot armor than a gritty, serious fantasy.

Which is why this flies


…and this doesn't.


But even in a comic book level story (i.e. a story where characters are extra sturdy as a rule) plot armor has to be hidden enough for the escape from death to be acceptable even by the standards of that world. That's why the fridge-in-nuclear-blast premise feels like blatant plot armor for Indy whereas the fall off a cliff on a tank with a nazi doesn't.

In a serious, gritty 'fight the nazis' story Indy's surviving of the tank cliff drop wouldn't be acceptable, but in Indiana Jones where magic is present if you squint, it is. Not so much though that a nuclear bomb isn't strong enough to cook someone in a fridge. You have to respect the limits of your own fantasy, is what I'm saying.

BUT.

And this is a big BUT.

There is a place and time for blatant plot armor, where it is acceptable and even fun. But it's a tricky thing to accomplish- it's when the plot armor is the premise of the plot. A character that is impervious to damage or immune to death for some reason, is a character with blatant plot armor that an audience could enjoy.


From the movie Sisu- the MC with a fine suit of plot armor we love to see

This plot armor could last throughout the story or only up until the endgame scene, but it exists, it's acknowledged, and explained away in some manner. It could be pure grit. It could be some kind of magical gift. It could be sheer luck. It could be 'godlike skill' for which the mc is legendary. Whatever it is, it's keeping the main character protected and (often) annihilating their opposition in inventive ways. This is what the audience is there to see. To have the main character survive against all odds, and mow down their enemies.



And that can be immensely satisfying- enough for the audience to roll with it and like it. The setup for it has to be appropriate. Everyone in the cast must acknowledge the reason for the character's plot armor. Like 'godlike skill':





Or actual godlike plot armor (magic dunking in magic river):


Or berserker madness.


Anything that will convince your audience to accept that one character is impervious to damage everyone else in the cast can and does take, is when you get to flaunt that plot armor and make it part of the plot. Any instance where a character should have died but survived instead, but the audience accepts it as logical enough, is you concealing their plot armor successfully.

Which of the two have you been doing the most?

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