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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34294
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34294
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

If you could remove that plot point and the story would remain the same, then it is not a deux ex machina. It is only deus ex machina if the entire resolution of the plot depends on an intervention of some force entirely outside of everything that has happened in the story before. In other words, it refers to a story in which the hero does not merit the outcome of their quest.

A Deus Ex Machina is about the overall resolution of the whole story. A plot point that is suddenly introduced out of nowhere and almost immediately resolved is a distraction. There is a progress to stories and elements that are not part of that progress are like being stuck in a traffic jam. Suddenly the reader is not making progress anymore. So much of the craft of storytelling comes down to this: keeping the story moving. Whatever else it is you want to get in, it has to also function to move the story forward. It must up the ante. This is what makes storytelling hard.

So what you actually have is something from outside the story crashing the party toward the end but not influencing the outcome of the story. That is not DXM, but it is almost certainly not going to work either. Stories work within a set of rules about what is physically and morally possible. These rules don't have to have a lot to do with what is physically and morally possible in the real world, but they have to be consistent in the story world or the reader won't know what is really a stake.

If you want to suggest that the story that the reader has just read in fact took place in a terrarium on the desk of a superbeing and that in the next book the heroes will have to escape from the terrarium and battle the god, that is fine, but it comes after the denouement, so that the story world remain intact until its moral and emotional arc is complete.

Original score: 7