Deus Ex Machina/Playing With

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Basic Trope: A miracle that saves the heroes at the last minute.

• Straight: Dr. Evulz has Alice hanging on a cliff when B.O.R. comes out of nowhere and saves her.
• Exaggerated: Evulz has Alice hanging on a cliff when God comes out of nowhere and zaps Evulz to dust.
• Justified:
  • The Deus Ex Machina was intentionally written by the author and will play a significant role in the rest of the series. There are other justifications, for example...
  • Alice puts her hope that something that will save her at the last minute. Such hope has actually worked before, but was portrayed as silly or meaningless beforehand.
  • Before B.O.R. got Put on a Bus, he spent most of his time randomly saving strangers from certain doom. When he shows up to save Alice at the last minute, the audience has mostly forgotten about it.

- God:"HEY, I'M A GOD I THINK THAT IS JUSTIFIED."

• • They're in an RPG where you can get God to smite evil people by praying really hard. Against bosses, it's usually a Useless Useful Spell. The True Final Boss, however, is susceptible to it.
  • Alice WAS god all along, but can only alter things subconsciously as she is unaware of her own divinity.
• Inverted: See Diabolus Ex Machina.
• Subverted: An eagle comes out of nowhere and just flies by...
• Double Subverted: Soon it swoops in and grabs Alice.
• Parodied:
  • Alice attempts to invoke a Deus Ex Machina by stacking the odds impossibly high against herself.
  • The heroes are trapped in an obviously inescapable situation... And then "Captain Deus Ex Manchina" bursts through the wall.
• Deconstructed: Alice realizes that no one is coming to save her and Evulz takes that into account as he gives her an Hannibal Lecture on how This Is Reality...
  • Alice, or one of her True Companions, is actually able to invoke Deus ex Machinas at will because they're a Reality Warper, the use of Functional Magic, Super Luck, or some other means. This leads to them breezing through their adventure. When a character is in danger without their Machina'ing friend, they are killed or severely injured because they don't know how to handle themselves without such story-breaking help.
  • A Reality Warper creates a Deus Ex Machina to save themselves... which results in physics doing a Logic Bomb and an untold amount of destruction. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.
• Reconstructed: Ending on an evil laugh, Evulz accidently trips and falls to his doom.
• Zig Zagged: The eagle immediately drops Alice back onto the cliff, and she complains that she was hoping for something miraculous to happen, but it didn't. Before Evulz can kill Alice, the eagle comes by and grabs her again, apologizing for poor grip the first time around.
• Averted:
  • Dr. Evulz has Alice hanging on a cliff, and he sends her plummeting to her doom.
  • Alternatively, Alice defeats Dr. Evulz in even combat.
• Enforced: "Well, I've written myself into a corner... What to do, what to do... Oh I know! I'll write that B.O.R. will come in and save her!"
• Lampshaded: "It's a miracle! You don't see this happen everyday!"
• Invoked: Alice prays to God to watch over her and save her in case something happens.
• Defied:
  • Alice prays to God to not get in her way and to not have her friends come save her.
  • Evulz shoots Alice while she's praying.
• Discussed: "I must admit, until that eagle flew by I thought I was dead."
• Conversed: "Oh, come on! I'm not complaining that she survived, but you had to have it come out of nowhere?"
• Played for Laughs: Whilst rescuing her, the Eagle takes a crap and Alice is shown with a small pile of bird poop on her head.
• Played for Drama: Alice realizes that because of the increasingly unlikely outcomes of events, she is being controlled by some higher power, and really has no free will, or even a life of her own.

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