Plot device
anything which moves the plot forward or maintains it
A plot device or plot mechanism
is any technique in a narrative used to move the plot forward.
A clichéd plot device may annoy the reader and a contrived or arbitrary device may confuse the reader, causing a loss of the suspension of disbelief. However, a well-crafted plot device, or one that emerges naturally from the setting or characters of the story, may be entirely accepted, or may even be unnoticed by the audience.
Stories using plot devices
Many stories, especially in the fantasy genre, feature an object or objects with some great magical power, such as a crown, sword, or jewel. Often what drives the plot is the hero's need to find the object and use it for good, before the villain can use it for evil, or if the object has been broken by the villains, to retrieve each piece that must be gathered from each antagonist to restore it, or, if the object itself is evil, to destroy it. In some cases destroying the object will lead to the destruction of the villain.
In the Indiana Jones film series, each film portrays Jones on the hunt for a mystical artifact. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, he is trying to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant; in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Jones is on a search for the Holy Grail. This plot device is also used in the Arabian Nights tale of "The City of Brass," in which a group of travelers on an archaeological expedition journeys across the Sahara to find a brass vessel that Solomon once used to trap a jinn.
Several books in the Harry Potter series orient around a search for a special object.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Plot device” is anything which moves the plot forward or maintains it. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Plot, device and anything, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q841154. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Plot device” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.