Quotes / Voodoo Shark

Fanfics

"I think you just dug the plothole even deeper"

— Commentary on The Prayer Warriors, in response to a belated parenthetical note

Lincoln Loud: "Hold on a second. There were twelve people packed into that van and none of them noticed that I was missing?"

Lisa Loud: "Given how uncharacteristically spiteful we've been acting up to this point, I wouldn't be surprised if we left you behind on purpose. Though that still wouldn't explain how our parental units would fail to notice our absence."

[...]

Luna Loud: "See? He said we had to turn the van around. If we were coming back from the park, the rest stop would be in front of us, not behind us!"

Lucy Loud: "Well, unless we had already passed the rest stop again by the time Lincoln made that call."

Luna: "Oh, right... (Beat) ... Wait, no, that would make even less sense! How could we have spent an entire day at the park without noticing that Lincoln was missing?!"

— Peeking Through the Fourth Wall, Episode 4

Dipper Pines: “I have so many questions about how… everything works! Like spider breath in general! How is the griffin producing a separate living creature?! That should be biologically impossible!”

Eda Clawthorne: “Symbiotic relationship between the griffin and a colony of spiders.”

Dipper: “…but that raises so many more questions.”

—Interdimensional Cartoon Discussion and Support Group

Literature

Santa Claus: "That Harold who sat on my knee at the mall last year didn't even look like the real Harold!"

Mrs. Claus: "Harold is a real person, Papa. Real people look different from year to year."

Santa: "You know what's going on here, don't you? Harold's parents are trying to trick me into believing in him!"

Mrs. Claus: "And just why would they do that?"

— The Day Santa Stopped Believing In Harold

Video Games

"You see, because the entropy of, uh... Alright, I can't BS my way outta this one."

— The Fail Screen in response to a physics-defying fail, Henry Stickmin Series

Web Animation

Wolverine: No, no, don't change the subject here. Why aren't you dead?
Magneto: Oh, that. Well, you see, that wasn't me.
Wolverine: Oh really now?
Magneto: It was actually Xorn's twin brother, possessed by the sentient mold Sublime, pretending to be me, pretending to be Xorn.

— Floating Hands, "X-Men: Death Becomes Them" (This actually happened in the comics.)

Webcomics

Q: Why did the Wailord dropped a boulder on Bubble's adoptive mother Swampert?
A: the boulder was attached to that Wailord's underbelly, like Barnicles, and in its leap over Mama Swampert, the boulder detached itself.

— Sonichu Q&A

Web Original

We’ve talked before about how the impossible is far easier to accept than the implausible, and once Us lets us in on what’s really going on, it falls decidedly on the wrong side of that line.

—Scott "El Santo" Ashlin, 1000 Misspent Hours

Layton: As I suspected, what appears to be a larger than average dog is actually a hologram projected from an orbital satellite.
Luke: ...Huh?
Layton: The dozens of people we have met claiming to have pet the dog are actually paid actors.
Luke: But WE pet the big dog too!
Layton: Only because our tea was laced with powerful hallucinogens in concert with hypnotic suggestion.
Luke: That's... Why would anyone do this?
Layton: The culprit appears to be preying on local superstitions of the Legendary Big Dog as part of an elaborate ploy to make one of his neighbors jealous.
Luke: ...I... uh. I think it would be much more plausible for there to just be a large dog.

— Twitter microfic parodying Professor Layton

The argument holds less water than my sister on a road trip.

—Noah Antwiler on Highlander II: The Quickening

She set up a revenge plan for somebody who she hasn’t even met yet? Argh! This script is such mouldy old dick cheese! It's so badly written it has me physically attacking my keyboard to slate it!

—Joe Ford on Torchwood, "They Keep Killing Suzie"

Then we finally get an actual explanation for why the Federation is working with our plastic surgery addicted villains: The Head-Staplers have the technology to harvest whatever the hell is in the rings, and the Federation doesn't. Since the planet is in Federation territory, a partnership was formed. We also learn that the harvesting will make the planet uninhabitable. And if the Head-Staplers just establish a colony of their own on the planet, it'll take ten years for the rings to begin to take effect. Is it just me, or is this script roughly 90% about plugging up all its own plot holes?

—The Agony Booth on Star Trek: Insurrection

Chris: Lex doesn’t even have any reason to not like Clark now. The only thing that made him a bad person was Lionel and Clark being dicks to him for his whole life. But now he has NO MEMORY OF ANYTHING. He should be a decent guy!
David: Or a drooling invalid.
Chris: They’ve seriously taken away any reason he had to be evil, and just end up making him evil anyway. Like, it would actually be better if we got a scene where he finds a letter to himself that’s just a picture of Clark that says 'THIS GUY SUCKS' to explain it.

—Chris Sims and David Uzumeri on Smallville ("Finale")

Hahaha, thank you, Spider-Man, thank you for wrapping up this storyline in the most pointlessly absurd way possible. There’s nothing about this that I don’t adore. I love that the potential dramatic purpose of Mysterio’s double-masking is undercut by the strip revealing the truth after only one panel, and I sincerely hope the reasons behind it are never discussed or even mentioned. I love the fact that the “Dash” Dashell mask is presumably fixed in that glum expression. I love that he’s got glasses perched on top of the mask, and that those glasses apparently have transition lenses. I love the weird grimace Beck is making as the mask comes off, which is actually the sort of face you’d make if you were wearing a fishbowl full of water over a latex mask.

—The Comics Curmudgeon, "His hands are still yellow under the gloves! Are there multiple glove-layers too?"

Seriously. Totally. Even that time you saw him walk through motherfucking walls. That was just… super-technology. Fucking hell, it’s like Marvel editorial wanted to solve the problem of a villain being convoluted and making no sense by seeing if they could get him to make even less sense.

—Topless Robot on The Clone Saga

Granted, the reveal at the end *does* sort of explain why Lola would resort to such sadism. Unfortunately, it also raises a plethora of other questions.

— Mr. TyeDye, reviewing Singled Out

Web Video

"That's what a voodoo shark is: when your story depends on something so moronic, that there's no way of explaining it without resorting to something that's equally stupid!"

— SFDebris on Star Trek: Voyager, "The Cloud"

Slowbeef: See, I loved how they tried to explain things away from the first game, but ended up fucking things up more.

— Retsupurae on Escape

"Way to double-down, gang. You just tried to put out a dumpster fire with a much-larger, easily-avoidable dumpster fire."

— Honest Trailers on Ghost in the Shell (2017)

Pat: Our mysterious whispering immortal and his band of merry men find Connor and other immortals strapped to these tables underground. He seeks out Connor, then — takes all their heads?! Wait, t-t-this is holy ground, right? HE CAN'T DO THAT!
Spoony: He just did.
Pat: [whining] But he can't!
Spoony: [admiringly] You heard the man! He "doesn't care about the rules!"
Pat: That's not how it works! Are you sure it's holy ground?
Spoony: Well, it has to be; there's monks with machine guns running around.
Pat: Ah, I guess you're right. That makes se— HUH??

—Noah Antwiler and PatTheNESPunk watch Highlander: Endgame

Rich: As Theodore Rex explained, all dinosaurs are mildly-psychic when it comes to other dinosaurs.
Josh: I'm really glad you went back to pick up that plot detail, because the movie wouldn't make a lick of sense without it.
Jack: Also, I don't want to brush over what Rich Evans has just said… [everyone guffaws] These are not just dinosaurs living in the future; they are psychic, talking dinosaurs.
Rich: That concept has no payoff other than it's his only motivation to go on the case.

—Best of the Worst on Theodore Rex

"Why does he have a psychic link… to the husband… of a boy… he molested as a child? I know he's a priest. But priests don't have telepathy… I don't think? So… please explain."

—MikeJ on The X-Files: I Want to Believe

Phil: You can talk? But only once?
Duffy: I don't make the rules, Phil.
Bill: Or explain why there are rules, or where the rules come from.

—Rifftrax, A Talking Cat!?!

"You see, it isn't so much that Rowling doesn’t plan ahead that is the problem here—it's her later attempts to go back and fill plot holes that really damages the story."

—Shaun on Harry Potter

Western Animation

Carrie: Because I was born a ghost! Duh!
Darwin: How does that work?
Gumball: Duh! [Beat] Actually, I have no idea.

—The Amazing World of Gumball, "Halloween"

"Well, that answers that question, and raises so many others."

—Grim, The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, "Here Thar Be Dwarves"

Cubert: That's impossible. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light.
Farnsworth: No, no, no, of course not. That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2092.

—Futurama, "A Clone of My Own"

[Several people have suddenly appeared in Doof's pants]
"Well, obviously something's amiss. Ugh, let's review. The Go-Away-Inator, which missed the condo, should've zapped whatever it hit to an undesirable location. Let me check my undesirable location wheel. Stonehenge, Burbank...my pants?! Why would I even write that there? Oh, I see, I got it confused with my dry-cleaning wheel. Oh, okay, but...why do I have a dry-cleaning wheel?"

—Dr. Doofenshmirtz, Phineas and Ferb, "Candace Gets Busted"

"...That's when I buried 10,000 Star Destroyers under the ice. Who built them? Better yet, who will fly them? Ice zombies? That's when we started mass-producing ice zombies. Who staffed the ice zombie machines? That's for another trilogy!" [Beat] "I was also Snoke."

—Emperor Palpatine, Robot Chicken, "Emperor Palpatine's Plan"

Real Life

"The Loch Ness Monster is a submarine. Driven by Bigfoot."

—Bill Hicks

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