We all have our guilty pleasures with certain stories, which is not at all a problem. You may get some flack for liking said story, but there is nothing wrong with that. We like what we like. For example, some people really love the Twilight saga books. These people claim that the romance between the titular characters Bella Swan and Edward Cullen is that of a fairytale, something a lot of people crave. Other people love the Hunger Games trilogy, myself included for two thirds of the storyline. These people, including me, like the strong symbol of modern feminism Katniss Everdeen represents, who can be credited for helping create the trend of non-damsel in distress female characters. Then there is my headline guilty pleasure, which I am both proud of and ashamed of at the same time. This guilty pleasure is the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comics.

Before anything is said on the comics, I know already that they have a reputation of being quite strange at times. Depending on the writer, a character can act almost exactly like their video game counterpart or be fladerized to the point of annoyance. However, when the right person is in charge of the story, I think the plot can be amazing. I think the characters are well fleshed out most of the time, and can sometime feel like an actual person (or animal-human as in the case of this series). But the comic book and guilty pleasures are not the main focus of the editorial this time. The true focus is the cliché of the ex machina, a well known trope that effects every genre of books, even fantasy.

An ex machina is when a plot device is introduced suddenly to resolve a conflict. They are commonly used as an easy way out of a hard to resolve plot line or to keep a plot formula consistent even if it does not make sense to the certain arc being told. For my guilty pleasure of the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comics, it is the seven chaos emeralds. Whenever a conflict quickly needs to be resolved, these crystals are used to power up a character to the point of being compared to a demigod. Nine times out of ten, the chaos emeralds appear out of thin air for the characters to use. Always with these powerful gems, the characters end up winning in whatever conflict they were engaged in, such as defeating a strong robot army. Never do the crystals fail, or the characters have to rely purely on their own wits to save the day.

The ex machina trope does not end with the chaos emeralds. In many other fictional tales, similar get of jail free cards are given to the cast. From the Hunger Games, the ex machina was the poisonous nightlock berries that the main characters Katniss and Peeta threatened to ingest if they both did not win the games. From the final volume of the Death Note manga, it was replacing the Death Note in the case of Near so he would not die. From the Warriors novel Darkest Hour, despite how great it was, StarClan helping out Firestar in the final battle was the ex machina. Even the Harry Potter book series did this with the centaurs not once, but twice. A lot of books are guilty of this trope, either for the better or the worse.

Even if an ex machina is useful to the plot, there is no denying that it is an easy way out. Worse, an ex machina can be formulaic in the cases of some stories. This creates not one but two problems for the plot. One, the believability of the tale is threatened with such a simple solution being introduced. Second and foremost, an ex machina can end up fusing other clichés together such as a formulaic plot, which threatens originality in the story. The easy way out is never the way to go in a storyline.

The reason we exist as writers is to create imaginative, original stories. An ex machina threatens that very role we were born to do. In every story, even those we love as guilty pleasures, there needs to exist a strong flow of creativity. Otherwise, every story would end up with the same conclusion. Do you want copy and paste stories, or out of the box original content? The choice is yours to do this by eliminating the ex machina.