I feel like every story has a plot hole.
Especially time travel stories, none of them ever has a consistant rule of time travel.
I feel like every story has a plot hole.
Especially time travel stories, none of them ever has a consistant rule of time travel.
First, we have to agree on what a plot hole is.
My definition of a plot hole in a story is something that simply can not happen given the existing rules of the story, or something which could only happen in an unexplained and if not literally impossible than at least so unlikely it is practically impossible way that defies everything else we know about the story.
This would be an item inexplicably jumping locations, a character having knowledge they could not possibly have, or a character or item being in two places at once. Things like that which gnarl the story.
What it isn’t: A character making a bad decision, a character acting unusual (even to the point of acting out of character- that can be bad writing, but not a plot hole), a character forgetting something, a plot contrivance, an unlikely coincidence, something being unrealistic but consistent within the context of the story.
I commonly see poorly written scenes, or scenes where someone thinks a character was acting irrationally, or scientific or legal or other plot points that are intentionally written to serve the story described as plot holes.
With that description, I’d say quite a great number of works of fiction don’t have plot holes.
A character acting out of character may not technically be a plot hole, but for the consumer of the media, it is tantamount to the same thing. The character’s previous characterization is equivalent to “the existing rules of the story”.
Not to say that characters cannot change, but you can tell when a character suddenly does something out of character simply because the author decided that some event has to happen for the plot to work, and it makes the plot seem impossible.
Yeah, say you have a story about Gandhi, and in act 3 he stabs a British soldier in the neck, and chomps on a hamburger. I’d call that a plot hole, even if the events are entirely possible.
I 100% agree with this.
One of the classic examples often given (and one of the top results if you search for “famous plot holes”) is from The Lord of the Rings. “Why don’t the Eagles just fly them to Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring, allowing them to bypass all the trouble getting there?” It’s often cited as a well-known plot hole and given as an example to define what a plot hole is.
Yet it’s not a plot hole at all. It’s just characters making decisions the reader might not agree with.