Gaping Plot Holes, Part the Final

Pan riding home from the rescue.

Another aspect of “Gaping Plot Holes” that confuses me is all the conversations on forums, comments sections, and even listicles like “10 Gaping Plot Holes that you never noticed!” I’ve seen so many forum posts along the lines of “Oh wow, I never noticed that before, but you’re right, that’s a terrible plot hole!”

But really, it’s not a plot hole if you watched the entire movie, read the entire book, or played the entire game, and never noticed it. If you thought about it later, or a friend told you, or you read it on the internet – that’s not the same thing as encountering something so wrong in a story that it calls attention to itself as you experience it. Clearly, the story carried you along past that moment, and it was inoffensive enough that you didn’t notice it. It’s not a plot hole for you.

So my overall conclusion about the “Gaping Plot Hole” issue is: sometimes stories have truly stupid plot holes. More often, they don’t.

If you encounter something in a story that you feel doesn’t make sense, you can announce to the world that the story teller is stupid and lazy, or you can think for a few moments and ponder whether there might be more going on under the surface. That perhaps the author thought you had the insight and intelligence to figure it out what was going on. If you choose the former path, and it turns out the answer was obvious… well, maybe you’re not the audience for that particular story.

-BTK