Revealing Continuity Lapse

"Something's...different."

Evan: There's literally nothing, there's just a wall now. No crawlspace, no nothing, no tunnel...what the...? Nothing!
Alex: I don't know, man...
Evan: Huh! Well, that figures. Smell's gone...
Alex: Hole's gone...
Evan: Hole's gone.

— Everyman HYBRID, "Last Week / Taking It Back".

This trope happens when a continuity error or several is made intentionally, either to hint at oddities within the story, as the result of a reality change, add a layer of mystery, or to make fun of the fourth wall.

Maybe someone's shirt will change mid-scene. Maybe a tree that was there one day is no longer there the next, or maybe it moved ten feet down the block. Characters may come Back from the Dead with no explanation and a denial that they ever were dead to begin with. This is only a few specific forms this phenomenon can take. The characters may or may not be aware of it, but if they are, it'll no doubt create confusion as their own reality is inconsistent with itself. If they aren't, it's likely there for the audience to try and piece things together.

Usually, this implies that something about the very fabric of the character's reality is wrong or becoming imbalanced. As such, it works very well as a part of a Mind Screw work, but doesn't need to be. While it's often long-term continuity that's being messed up, it may still appear in a series with loose or Negative Continuity. Usually Played for Drama, with the errors being serious and often hinting at a greater problem; can be Played for Laughs in scenarios poking fun at the Fourth Wall or common editing mistakes. What counts isn't the purpose behind the errors, but the fact that they're there for a purpose at all — the story wouldn't be quite the same without them.

Sometimes there will eventually be The Reveal about why these things are happening, but it's not absolute, and depends on the story.

One specific variant is The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday, where a mysterious store appears from nothing and disappears just as quickly, and Vanishing Village, where an entire community can appear and disappear at will. Another subtrope is the Backstory Invader, a character who suddenly appears in a story without explanation and is mysteriously accepted by the other characters as always having been there. This might occur as part of a "Groundhog Day" Loop, with small changes happening each cycle. Another possibility is that everything is All Just a Dream, with the inconsistencies being a clue. Another common variant is a character's memories being imperfect retellings of the original scene, due to the limits and failings of their own mind.

Compare Plot Hole, which works have a tendency to Lampshade. Also compare A Glitch in the Matrix and Cosmic Retcon. May overlap with Spot the Thread. In a Gaslighting situation, the gaslighter might make these changes on purpose to undermine their victim's sense of reality. This may also come due to the actions of a Reality Warper, the result of a Merged Reality blending the timelines, or part of a Fourth-Wall Observer noticing the errors others wouldn't.

Note: Before adding an example, consider if the error's removal would change anything about the work's plot, setting or meaning, and if it's caused by anything in the story itself. If neither of the criteria fits, it falls under Easter Egg instead.

Here be unmarked spoilers. Tread carefully.

The examples have been arranged alphabetically. Please put your examples in the proper place.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• In Cardfight!! Vanguard (V Series), the five members of the high school's Vanguard club take a picture together. When one of the member's becomes Ret-Gone, she disappears from the picture. One of the first things the other characters realize is off is that the photo is not centered on the group. The student council also notes that their club was approved despite not having enough members.
• Many minor examples occur in part five of the The Garden of Sinners anime adaptation, where apparent continuity errors allow the viewers to piece together the distorted chronology of the movie. E.g. when Touko arrives at the Oogawa building, she parks next to two cars already there, but in the next scene, we see Mikiya and Tomoe arrive in one of the cars that "were" already there in Touko's scene, allowing viewers to infer that Touko arrives after the guys have gone inside.
• Sailor Moon: During the Sailor Stars season, a photo in Usagi's room shows herself, Mamoru and their Kid from the Future, Chibi-Usa. When we see the photo again once Shadow Galactica starts attacking in earnest, it's only of Usagi and Mamoru. It's because Galaxia already killed Mamoru and Usagi doesn't know, and Chibi-Usa can't exist if her dad dies before she's born.

Comic Books

• Early in Identity Crisis (2004), Dr. Light has a flashback to being tackled by the JLA, including Batman. Green Arrow had already told Wally about this incident, and an important point in his story was that Batman and Superman weren't there. Most fans wrote this off as a mistake — but author Brad Meltzer, an experienced mystery writer, was actually planting a clue. We ultimately learn that Batman was there and wouldn't condone mindwiping Dr. Light, so in desperation, the League wiped his mind too. This, not the decision to alter Light's personality, was the line they crossed that made them stop doing mindwipes.
• Love Everlasting centrally focuses on the protagonist, Joan Peterson, finding herself in a bizarre loop of old-timey love stories akin to 50's/60's-era romance comics, where as soon as she reaches the end of a love story, she ends up in another one in a completely different time, place, genre, and with a different romantic male lead. During the "Too Hip For Love!" arc, Joan ends up in a story that lasts far past the usual stopping point of the love interest asking her to marry him, and ends up experiencing an entire lifetime following marriage, including settling down, raising a family, and growing old. Despite forward progress, everything remains perpetually in 1963 — she and her to-be-husband graduated from the Class of 1963, they moved into their first house in 1963, both of her children were born in 1963 (despite being born two years apart), one of their grandchildren is born in 1963, etc. When she actually brings this up to her father, he points out that she was married 10 years ago in 1953, a definite signifier that something is actively screwing with whatever reality she's in.
• Mister Miracle (2017) is loaded with these following Scott Free/Mister Miracle's suicide attempt at the start of the series. The most explicit in-universe call to this is during the first issue, while recovering, he notices that his wife Barda's eyes are brown and not her usual blue, which she corrects him on, only for them to revert back to blue by the end of the issue. Other examples are far more subtle, such as the various twinges of distortion that plague the panel layouts, to the deliberately jarring pacing with abrupt lurches in time, which can be mentally backfilled but are meant to throw you off nonetheless. The overall effect coincides with Scott's deteriorating mental state and loose grip on his own life, letting the viewer know that very little, if anything in the comic can be taken at face value.
• In Scott Pilgrim, Scott himself is notoriously unable to remember things that happen from issue to issue (and even further back), and since everything is shown through his eyes, things that are easy to look up in a past volume clash with whatever Scott says about what happened back then. This is partly because Gideon has been in his head pretty much since the moment Scott started dating Ramona, and has been "spicing up" Scott's memories this whole time, but mostly it's because of Scott's own selfish personality and Self-Serving Memory.

Fan Works

• In the metafictional story Daring Do and the Secret of the Fourth Wall, Rainbow Dash notices continuity mistakes and thinks they're evidence that she's been sucked into a fictional story. For example, at one point she wonders how she can see anything in a room that ought to be pitch black, and only then notices that she's holding a lit torch — in spite of the fact she fell into a lake shortly before, and she has no memory of relighting the torch.
• Down the Karmic Hole has Bunnyx attempting to prevents the events of The Karma of Lies; however, she gets several details about its events wrong, such as believing Lila got her hands on the Black Cat Ring. This is attributed to Bunnyx getting events mixed up with other timelines she's corrected, showing that she's having trouble keeping everything straight.
• Dread String of Fate notes that Miraculous Ladybug has trouble keeping track of how many pictures of Adrien are hung around Marinette's room; the only consistent detail is how the presence of these pictures is used to humiliate her for having a crush. This gets Played for Drama when Marinette reveals to Luka that she keeps taking them down, only for them to mysteriously reappear on their own. While this has led her to question her own sanity, it's a side-effect of her being literally bound to Adrien by their Red String of Fate, which keeps punishing her for trying to get close to him and trying to defy her destiny.
• Scootertrix the Abridged:
  • In Episode 13, Pinkie Pie and Spike notice that various ponies' racing numbers (or "butt stickers" as everyone calls them) are disappearing and reappearing with no explanation between shots. Pinkie (who knows that they all exist inside a cartoon) tries to distract Spike so he doesn't figure out the truth.
  • In Episode 16, Pinkie exploits the fourth wall to create a beneficial continuity error: getting movie tickets for her friends, even though the movie's completely sold out. The downside of this Reality Warper power is that weakening the show's continuity also weakens the seal that's imprisoning Discord.

Film — Live-Action

• In Dark City, the police gets a book of drawings supposedly from John Murdock's childhood in Shell Beach, but when they get it, it's empty. However, while it's in their custody, the book appears to have "developed" the missing child drawings, prompting Inspector Bumstead to ask Murdock for explanations. Murdock doesn't know that his interferences with the Tuning have been causing delays to the Strangers and they weren't able to complete the drawing book until the next interval.
• In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Hermione using her Time-Turner to attend multiple classes at once is depicted by her appearing in classes between shots, as well as subtle changes such as wearing a sweater one minute and not the next.
• Jacob's Ladder: Strange and surreal things are littered all over the story, which includes changes to Jacob's known reality. His hospital has no recollection of him ever visiting, his doctor supposedly died, he and his Vietnam veteran buddies were supposedly discharged before ever departing, and more.
• In Shutter Island there are many of these, but most notably when interviewing patients one asks Agent Chuck for a glass of water, and in subsequent cuts the glass is there when Chuck is in frame but doesn't exist when he is not, showing Chuck isn't actually Chuck.
• Teen Beach Movie:
  • In the first movie, as part of Mac and Brady being sucked into a fictional movie world, they notice things don't quite line up with reality. They change clothes in an instant, their hair is dry even when they've fallen into the ocean, and they even experience an immediate time-shift.
  • In the sequel, movie protagonists Tanner and Lela end up in the real world. For quite a while, their interactions with reality line up with the rules established in their own world- their hair is dry in water, and whatever clothes they wear instantly turn into clothes straight from the 60s.

Literature

• Animorphs has multiple variations of the trope:
  • Megamorphs #3; Visser Four uses the Time Matrix to rewrite human history in order to make it more susceptible to invasion. The Animorphs have no idea anything's wrong, but the readers sure do, as prominent characters are missing and personalities are drastically different, not to mention the sorry state the world is implied to be in. It isn't until chapter 3 that the Drode drops in to finally explain what's going on, restore the Animorphs to their original selves and task them with stopping Visser Four.
  • Megamorphs #4; Crayak creates a new timeline where the Animorphs never existed. This time, Cassie does know something's wrong from the beginning, but can't put her finger on what. Eventually, however, the timeline becomes more and more unstable, with people suddenly teleporting from miles away and coming Back from the Dead with no explanation. This turns out to be because Cassie is a space-time anomaly who will always try to revert things back to the original timeline.
  • Animorphs #41: Jake wakes up years older in a world that has been taken over by the Yeerks. But details don't match up from moment to moment, and it turns out to be All Just a Dream.
• In The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke, the remnant of the human race has lived inside the sealed city of Diaspar for roughly a billion years. This is supposedly because invincible alien Invaders conquered the universe and forced humanity to remain inside of this reservation on Earth. Alvin comes to the realization that there is something wrong with the whole story of the Invaders forcing humanity to live inside of Diaspar because there are absolutely no records describing the Invaders or the specific terms of the agreement that they made with humanity. The entire story was just literally programmed into everybody's minds. It turns out that this is because the Invaders are nothing more than an intentional myth invented by the founders of the current version of Diaspar to convince everybody to remain inside of the city forever.
• John Dies at the End: Arnie notices some inconsitencies in David's retelling of his adventure in Las Vegas, such as when he refers to his group as "the five of us", even though one of them had just died, which should have left only four of them. This is because one of their group was erased from existence by the Shadow People, and David's use of Soy Sauce has left him as one of the only people who remembers him.
• All three books in Mistborn: The Original Trilogy contain quotes from plot important, in-universe books in the chapter headers. Of note is the rubbing of the steel wall in Well of Ascension, which describes Alendi, Hero of Ages. Many of the quotes show up without context in the headers, only for slightly different quotes to appear in the story many chapters later; for example, the header claims that Alendi towered over others, while the quote claims that despite his small stature, he towered over others. The epilogue reveals that there is some entity that can change all text not written in metal, and changed the description of Alendi to match Vin.
• Murmuration: Mike experiences more and more of these as the novel progresses. While some are minor (such as his realization that he never orders inventory for his bookshop, despite his signatures on the deliveries he receives), some are more significant, such as three photos breaking in a bar brawl, one of which features a person who has been Ret-Gone.
• My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!: The story centers around the main character Catarina realizing that she's the Alpha Bitch in a Romance Game and starting to reform herself to avoid a Self-Disposing Villain fate. Her changes in behavior result is quite a few things going differently in the story in regards to the game. By the time her life joins up with the game's timeline, Catarina is no longer the type of person who would bully the Player Character, and actually winds up becoming good friends with her. The story's timeline also gets prone to relatively believable In Spite of a Nail moments. However, one can tell something is really off when the scene from the game in which Catarina is called out for bullying the Player Character plays out despite the bullying never happening in the first place.
• Rules For Vanishing: Nine people enter the road to find Becca. In chapter 8 of Sara's written testimony, she describes the group hearing a scream and investigating to find only a bird. Nothing else happens in the chapter, but at the end it mentions eight people continuing the journey. It turns out that one of them was killed, and the others' memories of his existence were erased.

Live-Action TV

Series:

• Doctor Who: In "Flesh and Stone", there's a brief scene where the Doctor is seen in his jacket, which he lost earlier in the episode. The season finale reveals that this scene features the Doctor from his personal future, and what he says here plays a role in the plot of the finale.
• Hikonin Sentai Akibaranger: The Big Bad suddenly undergoing Motive Decay is one of the things that cause the characters to recognize that they are in a show. The continuity changes become far more blatant as the producers railroad the rebelling characters towards the show's ending. For example, a character who was killed turns up alive and the explanation is that he had only been hit with the back of the blade even though he had actually been killed with a gun.
• Lost: Sawyer's marksmanship in the first season goes all over the place, from killing a polar bear from a distance easily yet missing a person's heart at point blank range. It's not dwelled on at all, which left people thinking it was just a mistake, but it later turns out that Sawyer's developing far-sightedness and needs glasses.
• The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Parallels" has an increasing number of these as the episode progresses, with Worf noticing them as they happen. This turns out to be a sign of what's happening to him; he's switching involuntarily between different quantum realities.
• Torchwood: "Adam" begins like any other episode of the series, with the opening credits showing the characters you've seen before... and Adam. Suddenly, there is a new member who apparently has worked with the Torchwood team for the past three years, and for some reason, everybody remembers the new guy. Turns out, he is some kind of alien entity that can only survive by inserting himself in the memory of other people.
• A Touch of Cloth: Parodied in series 2 when a supporting character points out a Plot Hole, namely that there was no reason for Cloth to have stolen the pound of heroin from the evidence room when he didn't even know at that point that he would need it later. Cloth rants that he doesn't obey any laws, including the laws of continuity, and grows and ungrows a full beard in between shots to prove his point.
• Twin Peaks:
  • In one episode, Cooper is in the Black Lodge and drinking a cup of coffee. Between shots, the coffee turns from liquid to solid and back again with no possible explanation. This serves to add a bit of Surreal Horror and underline the Black Lodge's status as an Eldritch Location.
  • In the final episode of The Return, Cooper meets up with someone who seems to be an amnesiac, alternate version of Laura. He takes her to her parents' house in Twin Peaks, sure that this will jog her memory. When they get there, they find that it is occupied by the Chalfont/Tremond family, and no-one has ever heard of the Palmers. Cooper is incredibly confused, and this implies that something is incredibly off about the world he's in.

TV Movies:

• Halloweentown: In the first movie, there are subtle changes around Halloweentown that signify something is going wrong. Marnie and her siblings first notice the big town pumpkin isn't looking the same as it does in their grandmother's book, and the grandmother notices her friends changing in appearance and personality before vanishing altogether. This is all due to the villain's magic.
• This House Has People in It: The main short-film video alone features phantom hands coming from a part of the basement where nobody could possibly be hiding and Madison phasing through the floor to fall on a mattress in the basement, only to disappear in an immediate cut to the screams of her parents.
• Unedited Footage of a Bear: Right when the short-film starts, viewers are treated to an advertisement that interrupts the bear footage, complete with a YouTube ad-skip counter... despite the film premiering on television. The ad-counter itself is counting upwards in time rather than down. This is only the beginning of the surreal horror that unfolds.

Video Games

• The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation: One early hint to the true nature of what's going on can be found in the characters' cellphones: while most list the year as 2016, one states that it's 2020, foreshadowing that the odd one out is the only one who's still alive, trying to help the others move on.
• Confess My Love: During each repetition, minor things change around the room, such as the sudden appearance of a new character named Julie, the title screen characters becoming silhouettes, and the discovery of a knife, showing things slowly becoming stranger and darker.
• In Death Come True, it's possible to abruptly encounter The Masked Figure while replaying scenes where they didn't originally appear. This helps Makoto start figuring out the true nature of the situation he's in, namely that it's taking place Inside a Computer System.
• Puyo Puyo Tetris: Chapter 10 takes place in a dream that Ex is having where he meets Ms. Accord, someone who he never met before. This is what makes him realize that this is not his dream.
• SIMULACRA: Each time the player looks at the phone's Lock Screen, the picture of Anna changes very slightly, fitting in with the haunted technology plot and doing a good job of unnerving the audience.
• Shade: The plant in the apartment changes what type of plant it is, going from a hyacinth plant, to a spider plant, then a fern, and finally a cactus. This serves as foreshadowing that the entire apartment is a hallucination.
• The Stanley Parable: In addition to small changes occurring the more the player repeats the game, done only to be unsettling, some endings invoke this. Most notably, the "Confusion" ending, where even the Narrator is aware that things are changing and going wrong and tries desperately to get things back on track, as the player is thrown into never-seen-before areas, sees the setting take on Alien Geometries, and each attempt at fixing the story just makes things more convoluted than the last. Even after the game returns to "normal", there's a lingering remainder of the events of the "Confusion" ending, implying that the continuity is still messed up.
• Wargroove 2: Conquest Mode includes two characters who were killed off in the original Wargroove as playable characters. Other characters gradually become aware that this is an indication that something's not quite right, foreshadowing that Conquest Mode is actually a Lotus-Eater Machine.
• YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG: One of the first indications that Alex is jumping between universes comes in the form of Michael's residence inexplicably moving one house over, with Michael having no memory of making such a move.

Visual Novels

• Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair starts acting up towards the end. Aside from various visual glitches, dead characters inexplicably start appearing as if they never died.
• Doki Doki Literature Club!: Though a normal dating sim at first, things take a strange turn following Sayori's suicide. The entire game resets but without Sayori's existence, Natsuki forgets entirely about an argument she'd had with Yuri the day before, and she and Yuri both suffer moments of insanity only the player seems to notice and remember. This is because of Monika tampering with the game's files to make the player love her instead of the other girls.
• Spirit Hunter: NG: While investigating the Miroku Mansion, Akira hears a phone ringing and tracks the sound back to the living room... which he'd already searched. He notes with trepidation that he hadn't seen the phone before. Answering it turns out to be a bad idea, as the Screaming Author starts harassing him, calling his mobile and home phone even after he's unplugged the latter.

Web Animation

• Battle for Dream Island: In "The Reveal", when Nickel was introduced in the show, his design was very off to his Inanimate Insanity counterpart, having arms, and having a deep urge to replace Coiny, he even held a sign saying "TO DO LIST: REPLACE COINY!" But in his debut, "Yeah Who, I Wanna Know" in Season 2, he lost his arms, and became more chill. This was later explained in the non-canon episode "TWO OF THEM!? - BFDI X Inanimate Insanity 2023 Event", when the Announcer calls this out, in which the II Nickel excuse this, claiming that the sign meant to say "EMBRACE COINY", in which explains why he wore those "prosthetic arms", for a hug with him.
• Battle for Dream Island Again: In "Catch These Hands", the challenge was playing charades while in trash compactors, as FreeSmart struggled to get Book’s gesture, Book tries to help her team, by opening herself up to a page that says her gesture, but Ruby struggles to read it, because she never went to "gem school". But later, when it was her turn in the compactor, she was able to read her own gesture, in which Book find this out by reading her lips, Ruby confesses that she was just lying about gem school, just so she would get some sympathy from Pencil after she scolded her for not being able to read the text.
• Battle for BFDI: In "SOS: (Save Our Show)", the Announcer Speaker Box calls out how Gelatin has never been eliminated in BFDI history, but later in BFDIA's continuation, "Taste the Sweetness", Gelatin actually does get eliminated, so before his departure, he asks for the Puffball Speaker Box to keep his elimination a secret from the Announcer, as he finds him scary.

Web Videos

• The 15 Experience: During the main experience, viewers had the choice between watching the Hackers View storymode or jumping from camera to camera. Doing both reveals some strange inconsistencies between the events- characters frozen in one room are seen elsewhere in the house, characters change position between cameras, and more.
• Alantutorial: Early in the series, Alan tried to show his viewers how to pick up a blue chair, only to fail because it was making him too emotional. He was later forced from his house, including the chair. The chair would later appear during his time lost in the wilderness despite this, due to its significance to Alan's life.
• The Angry Video Game Nerd: In his "Berenstain Bears" video, Nerd discovers the spelling of the titular franchise has changed on him from what he remembers in childhood. Apparently, this was caused by a split timeline, where the Nerd was killed by Jason in the "Friday The Thirteenth" video.
• In Captainsauce's The Sims 4 playthrough, there's an arc about time being messed up by the story's villains. This causes a lot of oddities in addition to the endless Time Loop- like characters coming back from the dead, Tommy continuously receiving the same promotion at work, and characters being de-aged.
• Clear Lakes 44: Birdwatcher tells his doctor about the strange things happening to him at times when changing rooms, from his lame leg being better to him being in a different place entirely.
• Counter Monkey: Noah suggests a good DM can use this to create tension. If a player points out a lore contradiction during the campaign, just smile and say "that is odd, isn't it?"
• Don't Hug Me I'm Scared: After Red Guy leaves the show, the picture in the kitchen has changed to show only Yellow Guy and the Duck, and Yellow Guy is frowning instead of smiling. They seem to notice something is different and missing, but can't put their finger on it before the episode's song starts, which turns out to be the most disjointed and surreal one yet.
• Everyman HYBRID: This is a constant happening in the series, thanks to the "iteration" reincarnation cycle the characters are trapped in. From unexplained events found in secret videos only the viewers could see (including moments that could not fit the timeline as we know it), to an explosion somehow killing people in a hospital five minutes before the boys went to save their very-alive friend and fight a very-alive security guard, to one of them coming back to life with no explanation given, and much more. It's just as confusing for the characters as it is for the viewers when they're aware of an inconsistency.
• Played for Laughs in the Jacksfilms video "Your Editing Lacks Continuity". Jack is having a dinner with his family as they critique his videos having continuity errors. Of course, that video is full of outrageous mistakes as the conversation is happening, from everyone's clothing and food changing to his father turning into a dog, all while Jack tries to defend his continuity abilities.
• Played for Laughs in a Joueur du Grenier episode that gives advice on making your own webseries, especially avoiding this kind of error: the scene plays out as a dialogue with the camera switching to each character as they speak, and every switch features a blatantly obvious error (the background goes from a kitchen to a veranda, a cell phone becomes a banana, one guy's Cool Shades become an enormous pair of novelty sunglasses, etc.), but the one they focus on is that a drawer in the background is closed in one shot and ajar in another. And of course, Fred is bareheaded in the first shot and wearing a wig in the last one where he tells viewers to watch out for such basic mistakes.
• Marble Hornets:
  • As a result of The Operator's influence, the characters have the tendency to literally lose time, such as Jay taking several days to drive home from an investigation while tweeting as though it's only been a few minutes.
  • When exploring Brian's house, Jay finds himself teleporting to different rooms, and it turns night within minutes despite him getting there in the daytime. All of this is captured on camera.
• Phelous: In the review for Jacob's Ladder, Phelous experiences some oddities. His attempts to get into his review room first lead him to a creepy hand-print covered shed instead, only to fix itself on the third attempt. After the review, he suddenly realizes the room is empty and that he can't remember the names of any other reviewer. This is because his other reviews were all a Dying Dream that's finally caught up to him.
• Tribe Twelve:
  • As a result of Slender Man and the Observer's influence, Noah loses track of time in a similar manner as Jay from Marble Hornets. One particular instance has him continuously chase the Observer around a hotel, repeatedly ending up in the same hallway. By the time he returns to his room, it's suddenly the middle of the night.
  • The power of the Collective is displayed when Noah suddenly receives two calls about people he knows being murdered. One of them, Kat, is suspected to have been killed by Noah himself, and he begins to think this is the case, despite him never leaving his house to be able to do it, having no memory of doing it, and not having wanted to do it at all. The only explanation is that he'd killed her during a moment of possession on Thanksgiving when he really was spending time with Kat, but was taken into the future to do it.
• To Boldly Flee: The influence of a literal Plot Hole creates chaos for all the characters. A montage of errors includes The Rap Critic having his toothbrush change into a twig, Diamanda Hagan having her sandwich turn into a hand, and Handsome Tom having himself and his desk move to the opposite side of the room. It's also explained that any continuity errors that had happened before the events of To Boldly Flee were also caused by the Plot Hole.

Western Animation

• The Adventure Time episode "Jake the Dog" shows Simon's skeleton wearing the Ice Crown, well after Finn took it from him. This is later explained in "Crossover", as Prismo takes the crown from this episode and places it on Simon's head right before the Mushroom Bomb explodes, thereby destroying it and ending its influence on the Farmworld universe.
• The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Test" has Tobias accidentally pulling a Hostile Show Takeover that turns the show into a terrible sitcom. One of the various production shortcomings is sloppy directing: one scene is set in the Watterson's living room, but after a Shot/Reverse Shot to Gumball and Sarah watching from the window, it's suddenly in the kids' bedroom on the next floor.
  Gumball: It makes no sense. We're not even in the living room anymore!
  Sarah: We're not even on the ground.
  (view changes to Sarah and Gumball floating in midair, then falling)
• BoJack Horseman:
  • When we watch flashbacks from the perspective of Beatrice Horseman, who is suffering from dementia, there are numerous blatant inconsistencies. Most noticeably, at one point Butterscotch begs Beatrice empty handed to speak to the maid whom he has impregnated, and when he speaks of coming to his wife 'hat in hand' his hands suddenly glitch and a hat appears, as though Beatrice just remembered it was there.
  • Discussed and Subverted in another case, when BoJack recounts a fan coming to him about a scene of Horsin' Around in which a coffee cup can be seen on the counter in shots of The Horse, but not of Ethan, asking whether this was done deliberately by the show's producers to make a profound statement about how even people who take part in the same event together can have entirely different experiences and memories of it. BoJack scoffs - some intern just left the cup there and nobody noticed it — but tells the fan Sure, Why Not anyway.
• While the reveal it sets up is fairly unimportant Milo Murphy's Law episode "Fungus Amoung Us" has a continuity error in which the protagonist's sister Sara's shirt, in several shots is missing the logo of her favorite show, which plays a major role in the plot. At the time it's written off as an error but the next episode, a direct continuation reveals that the time traveling mutant pistachio who took control of the show back in the beginning is a terrible showrunner and in the current timeline the show was canceled after 2 episodes, 50 years ago, long before Sara could become a fan.
• The Phineas and Ferb episode "Lost in Danville" is set in a parallel universe, as revealed in a twist ending. One of the only two hints to this twist is the fact that Phineas got an extra stripe on his T-shirt, something that would normally be passed off as an animation error. The other one is that Lawrence Fletcher is a polar bear, which was only shown moments before the twist reveal.
• SpongeBob SquarePants, In "Krusty Love", Mr. Krabs falls in love with Mrs. Puff and learns she's single despite her prefix.

  Mr. Krabs: Then what happened to Mr. Puff?
  (cut to a live-action shot of a hand turning on a blowfish lamp)
  SpongeBob: She doesn't like to talk about it.

• The Venture Brothers: Using several points of reference^note Most prominently, Dr. Orpheus' reading the Action Man's fate in season one's "Past Tense", stating that he'd have a stroke in "2 years, 17 days", which happens in season seven's "Arrears in Science" in the show, the series takes place over the course of a little over two years in-universe (despite 20 passing in real life from pilot to Finale Movie). However, all throughout, flashbacks to Rusty's childhood as a "boy adventurer" show him to be his (roughly) 10 year-old self despite up to a decade passing between some of the events. For example, he appears to be the same age when the Action Man kills Turnbuckle in 1966, Rusty helps his father build Gargantua-1 in 1971, and Kano kills Venturion in 1976. He is also shown to be a standard-aged college student when his father dies in 1987. If he was 10 years old during the '60s, he would have been much older at that time. In the first season, which debuted in 2004, Rusty claims (without appering to be deceitful) to be in his mid-40's, meaning he couldn't have been 10+ when some of these events took place. It was easy for most of the series to either Hand Wave it as the characters giving the dates being non-specific (about 40 years ago, about 50 years ago, etc.) or to accept it as a Series Continuity Error... until season seven's "The Inamorata Consequence" where it is strongly implied that like his own boys, Rusty was repeated cloned by his father after dying. The series finale movie then outright confirms it.
• In the What's New, Scooby-Doo? episode "E-Scream", most members of Mystery Inc. start behaving heavily out of character: Fred doesn't tell the gang to split up but instead they all go together, Daphne goes around wearing mismatched shoes without worrying of her look and Shaggy and Scooby offer themselves as bait for the monsters with no need of bribing them with Scooby Snacks. All these changes (plus the fact that Shaggy says "Toinks" instead of "Zoinks") end up to make Velma realize she is actually in a VR simulation.

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