Sandbox / Plot Hole Examples

Example subpages:

• Plot Hole Literature
• Plot Hole Western Animation

Other examples:

Anime & Manga

• Transformers: Cybertron:
  • When translated into English, it was changed from a standalone series to a sequel to Energon (which was later referred to as such in Japanese materials); unfortunately, this meant that several characters who were Killed Off for Real in Energon were alive and well here. It was explained that the reappearance of these characters happened because the Unicron Singularity screwed up space and time; this led fans to jokingly refer to the Singularity as the biggest plot hole in the universe.
  • The English version did fix a plot hole that was present in the original Japanese. In the English version, Cybertron spends the series hovering perilously close to the Singularity. In the Japanese version, it was sucked into the Singularity in the first episode; yet several subsequent episodes show the characters walking around on the surface.
• Bleach:
  • When Grimmjow's fraccions are killed off, Aizen states their deaths don't bother him because they were just Arrancar that had transformed from gillians. However, it's later confirmed by two separate sources (Grimmjow's flashback and Uryuu's assessment of Grimmjow's group) that the fraccions transformed from both gillians and adjuchas. In fact, there was only one gillian Arrancar in the group. Hollow evolution does mean that an adjuchas evolves from a gillian, but Aizen's comment related to the Arrancar transformation, not Hollow evolution.
  • While in prison, Rukia comments that she's been a member of the Kuchiki family for 40 years. A flashback to Renji being made vice-captain also discusses Rukia being a member of the Kuchiki family for 40 years. Then Byakuya reveals why Rukia was adopted: his wife died 50 years ago, leaving him a request to find and adopt her sister as his own. A year after her death, he finds and immediately adopts Rukia. But an immediate adoption a year after Hisana's death would put the adoption at 49 years ago rather than 40 years ago.
  • During the Zanpakuto Rebellion Arc it is clearly stated that the destruction of a zanpakuto spirit by anyone except its master will permanently destroy the zanpakuto itself. Late in the arc the brainwashing is reversed and the spirits reunite with their masters, but so are at least two zanpakutos that were supposedly destroyed permanently. This is completely ignored. It's not even given a handwaved explanation.
  • Yhwach's Auswahlen is eventually revealed to leave a silver blood clot in its victims that kills them, which Ryuken dug out of his wife's corpse and gave to Uryu so he could fire it at Yhwach, momentarily shutting off his powers so Ichigo could finish him off. The problem is that several victims of the Auschwalen survived while merely having their powers reduced, while others died from much more extraordinary means than a blood clot.
• Fist of the North Star has been guilty of making up the story as it went along, resulting in quite a few contradictions as the series went on:
  • There are plot-important revelations about Raoh and Taki's family in season 2 that contradict revelations about their past — with physical evidence — in season 1.
  • The scene where Mamiya revealed that she was branded as a "conquest" by Juda. This scar is instantly recognized. Even though Rei, the rival of said Juda, had seen Mamiya butt-naked twice before — hell, he even personally shredded her clothes off once.
• Berserk causes the first scene of the series to become a plot hole. Guts is shown having sex with a female Apostle, who turns into her demonic Apostle form and tries to eat him, but Guts just blasts her head off with his arm cannon — although Guts is established during the Golden Age arc to have a severe dislike to being touched by others because of the sexual assault he got as a child. This scene goes completely against the established grounded personality of the protagonist. Many people have decided that this could be a case of Miura wanting to create an R-Rated Opening for the sake of shock and interest; Miura openly admitting in interviews that he writes as he goes and that the Golden Age arc wasn't fully created in his head when the manga began, and causing this to be Early-Installment Weirdness; and others going with the idea that Guts was in the grips of his Enemy Within, so not really being the one in charge of doing the act.

• Naruto:
  • Naruto is said to have failed the final exams three times (and the exam at the start of the series is his fourth), but is in the same age group as others from his class (who are presumably taking it for the first time). This would mean he must have advanced through the earlier classes much faster than others (notably Sasuke and even Neji) and yet he is called a failure and a dropout. Further, if he did repeat the classes, he must have been in the same class as Neji, Tenten, and Lee in the previous year, though they do not seem to know him much when they first meet.
  • In databooks written by Kishimoto, the author of Naruto, several ages are listed for characters - for example, Anko is currently 27, Kurenai is currently 31, etc. The databooks also list other relevant ages, such as when several people were promoted to Genin or Chuunin. Kakashi is stated to have become a Chuunin at age six. In chapter 599 we see the Chuunin exams where Kakashi passes, and he's competing alongside people like Anko, Asuma, Kurenai, Ibiki, Hayate, etc. several of whom had yet to even graduate from the academy, let alone qualify for the Chuunin exams.
  • Madara Uchiha knows how to terminate the contract with Edo Tensei. He is the only person to be shown doing this, and even the creator of the jutsu doesn't know how. Being revived with Edo Tensei wasn't part of his Evil Plan, so there's no reason for him to have developed the technique.
  • When Obito becomes the Jinchuuriki of the Ten Tails, he is unable to use Kamui due to having the Ten Tails sealed inside his body. But when Madara later became the Jinchuuriki of the Ten Tails, he can use Kamui without problems in order to teleport to Obito, without any explanation. Furthermore, he did so by ripping Obito's left eye out of Kakashi's face, even though the left eye is meant for the long-distance Kamui while the right eye still in Obito's face is used to send oneself into the Kamui dimension.
  • Obito somehow avoids ever losing his eyesight despite his constant use of his Mangekyou Sharingan. It's not until he tries using Kaguya's portals that his eyes even bleed. On that note, Kakashi had limited use of Kamui for most of Part 2 because of the strain on his stamina, but starts using it considerably more during the final arc, and it's only one throwaway line late in the arc that he ever brings up failing eyesight.
  • Kakashi is able to use the complete and perfect Susanoo. Not only does this require a ton of chakra, which Kakashi doesn't have, but he manages to perform the highest level of the technique on his first try.
  • Deidara finishes his fight with Sasuke with a gigantic self-destruction technique. Sasuke survived the resulting city-sized explosion by summoning and mind-controlling a massive snake to shield him, when he was explicitly described as being nearly out of chakra just a few moments before. Sasuke also managed to do all of this after the explosion started, when he wouldn't have had enough time.

• Fairy Tail
  • Irene Belserion is revealed to be the creator of Dragon Slayer magic, yet Acnologia, who can smell Dragon Slayers all over the continent and was trying to kill them all, had no interest in her until she goaded him into a fight. The next time they meet (though "meet" might be inappropriate as Irene had just committed suicide), Acnologia suddenly knows this despite not even knowing her name before the end of their first confrontation.
  • One Running Gag since the beginning of the series is Natsu's motion sickness. This is later stated to be a Weaksauce Weakness shared by Dragon Slayers, brushing off Wendy and Gajeel not experiencing it earlier as "not being true Dragon Slayers". This is somewhat plausible from the former, a little girl, but makes little sense with the latter, an fully-grown man who'd fought on par with Natsu since an early arc. The aforementioned Irene would later explain that Dragon Slayers experience motion sickness because their draconic Super-Senses (namely their inner ears) are too potent for their otherwise human bodies, but Acnologia is shown to suffer from motion sickness even in his Dragon form.
• Gantz
  • Features a plot hole the size of a semi in one story arc where a gunman walks down a crowded Japanese thoroughfare, calmly gunning down literally hundreds of innocent bystanders. This scene was very important to the continuation of the plot, but raises one significant question...WHERE THE HELL ARE THE POLICE!?
  • Especially in comparison to a similar scene later in the series where the bullied Nishi murders his entire class after they threw him out of the window. That got an immediate response from a heavily armed SWAT Team.
• Infinite Stratos has one Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole at episode 4 when Ichika suddenly knew that Cecilia was in firing range on the unmanned I.S. drone. The Light Novels explains this by Ichika secretly communicating with Cecilia to fire on his command after unleashing Yukihira Type-2 by taking advantage of the barrier nullifying ability of the Laser Blade. Cecilia being frustrated to not be able to help out, answers the call. To people who have never read the Light Novels, it just counts as an Ass Pull.
• In the very first episode of Voltron (the lion version), as the five young explorers see the Castle of Lions from their spaceship, Keith details Voltron's backstory and how the witch deceived the robot (or its pilot(s)) and split big V into five robo-lions. Two or three episodes later, when the boys finally make contact with Princess Allura and Coran, the explorers are completely surprised that Voltron cannot be summoned/activated/whatever-they-expected and have to be told everything that Keith explained back in the first episode.
• In the twelfth episode of Elfen Lied, Nana gets past the police barricade to reach Mariko's position. She simply arrives there — no explanation given, the barricade not seen in her travels. Kouta and Lucy-as-Nyu arrive to the barricade and find every soldier and policeman knocked out/dead—this is never made clear. Bando is nearby with Kurama, but does not arrive until well after this in the next episode, so Bando's not responsible. Lucy is still Nyu, and remains this again until well after the discovery that the barricade is down. Mariko is by definition at the far opposite end of this barricade, and pulling anything like that would get her blown up real good. This leaves Nana as the knockout/killer. Except a huge plot point is that Nana does not kill, and with the exception of disabling the vectors (invisible arms) of other Diclonii, she has never shown talent for quietly knocking people out, in either anime or manga. Therefore, no one knocked out or killed the knocked-out/dead force at the barricade.
• The anime adaptation of Death Note usually averts the trope when adapting the manga, but probably the only notable example is that it does not reveal SPK member Ill Ratt to be a spy for Mello. As a result, the audience is left without explanation as to how Mello's crew obtained the SPK's true names and were thus able to kill them. The Rewrite 2 special cuts the mafia and has Mikami and Takada kill the SPK instead, but in cutting the mafia and thus fixing one plot hole, it creates another: Soichiro Yagami making the trade for Shinigami Eyes and his subsequent death are also omitted, leaving his absence and Light's knowledge of Mello's true name unexplained.
  • Arguably another notable example is all of Rem's decisions after Misa's arrest in that Misa's lifespan is always visible to Rem.
• In Trigun, Vash possesses a special revolver that has a hidden function of grafting to his arm and mutating it into an energy weapon of mass destruction. When Vash tries to stop Knives at the city of July, Knives exerts some control over the gun that forces Vash to destroy the city against his will. The same thing happens decades later in another city, leaving Vash emotionally devastated and fearful of causing more harm. So...why doesn't he just destroy the gun?
• Lyrical Nanoha has a couple. When the Wolkenritter drain Fate's linker core in A's, she is temporarily rendered incapable of using magic. However, her familiar Arf, who is dependent on Fate's magic for survival, suffers no ill effects. This plot hole was compounded by another one in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, as the excuse the writers came up with for sidelining Arf was that she didn't want to be a burden to Fate and so was always away from combat in her child form, which requires less mana to sustain. This makes very little sense, because by that time Fate was considerably more powerful than she had been as a child, and she was perfectly capable of supporting Arf then. This makes the plot hole in A's even worse, since when Fate was injured Arf remained in her adult form, despite the fact that it would be placing greater strain on Fate.
• In Digimon Adventure 02, the three new characters, Davis, Cody, and Yolei, each get a new set of clothing whenever they appear in the Digital World. This never happened to the original eight from the previous series, and it does, in fact, confuse them. When they go to the Digital World, they're always shown keeping whatever they happened to be wearing that day... until the end of the Digimon Emperor arc, where T.K. and Kari get new outfits for summer, but the Digital World always magically puts them in their spring/fall outfits they wore at the beginning of the series. This happens to Ken, too, where he's always changed into his school uniform.
• Digimon Tamers: Jeri being kidnapped and used as D-Reaper's power source happens totally off-screen and is not really explained. After a tragic event for her, she starts talking with her puppet, who eventually starts talking by itself. While the main characters are entangled in a fight, she walks offscreen behind some rocks without anybody realizing and when they go after her, she has already been kidnapped and replaced by an Agent. The subject is never addressed.
• Dragon Ball:
  • In regards to the Master Rabbit arc;
    • Goku punishes Monster Rabbit for turning Bulma into a carrot and his two decorated mooks by using his Power Pole to send them to the moon, where they must make treats for a year. Eight months later, it gets blown up by Master Roshi. However, the video games state Monster Rabbit and his cohorts got off the rock and back to Earth beforehand... which gives way to the plot hole: How?!
    • Early in the manga, Goku grabs Master Rabbit and his henchmen, extends his staff and plunks them onto the moon with absolutely no repercussions for Goku, or for them. And yet later, in the Freeza Arc, it's made a big deal that Goku can't breathe in space, so if Namek exploded and he wasn't in a spaceship, he'd die. This might be justified since the manga underwent a Genre Shift somewhat in the beginning, where it was mostly a comedic retelling The Journey to the West and when the Saiyans arrived, it began to focus a lot on martial arts, epic adventure and sci-fi.
  • In the manga and the original Japanese dub of Dragon Ball Z, there is a plot hole with regards to how Cell was able to survive and regenerate after he blew himself up, killing Goku, King Kai and Bubbles and destroying King Kai's planet in the process. According to Cell, an organ inside his head allows him to regenerate, so long as that organ is not destroyed. Goku had previously destroyed Cell's entire upper body, head included, which should have prevented the evil Android from regenerating. This plot hole is averted in Funimation's original English dub of the anime, where Cell states that "every cell in his body has a life of its own", and that one survived, which allowed him to regenerate.
  • In relation to the "Goku can't breathe in space" rule, in Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods and Dragon Ball Super, Goku actually goes into space, having no trouble breathing nor does he, obviously, die when it has been established that he is supposed to die when in space.
  • In Dragon Ball Super's retelling of Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F', Captain Ginyu makes his return, stealing Tagoma's body and rejoining Frieza. He tells him how he survived the destruction of Namek, but it never explains how he survived Kid Buu destroying Earth, especially since Vegeta specified that only the "good people" be resurrected. The only possible idea is that Ginyu kept his nose clean for the in-universe 14 years since arriving on Earth. However, Ginyu is still a frog and not technically a person. So it kinda is a loophole that Ginyu unwittingly exploited. But it must be noted that a quite a few people were brought back to life with that wish during the Majin Boo arc, that had no right to brough back to life. Android 8, Fangs The Vampire, Giran, etc.
  • Related to that, why Android 16 never was resurrected despite Android 8 and likely Arale demonstrating that purely robotic characters can be revived is never explained.
  • The entirety of Dragon Ball Minus causes a significant one regarding the character of Raditz. In the original manga, Raditz was one of the few remaining Saiyan warriors, who believed the false stories that Planet Vegeta was destroyed by a meteor, and went to Earth because he wanted to check up on his brother Goku's progress in conquering the Earth. While this works with the original story concerning Bardock's death and Goku's infancy, it causes problems when Minus retconned that Goku's parents had sent him away in secret well before the destruction of Planet Vegeta due to Bardock suspecting Freiza was up to no good. This raises substantial questions, such as why Bardock never told his elder son about what he suspected regarding Freiza, or why Raditz would think Goku had been sent to conquer Earth when nothing of sort indicated that was the case.
  • Dragon Ball Super features Goku, Vegeta, and Bulma going to Trunks' timeline using Cell's time machine. Cell doesn't come from Trunks' timeline, but instead a third one. If they used his time machine, they would have gone to his timeline, not Trunks'.
  • Old Kai is the fusion between a previous Supreme Kai and an old witch who steals his Potara earring and wears it. By the way, this all happened on the Sacred World of the Kai where only the Supreme Kais and their attendants are allowed to roam. So how did the old witch get to the Sacred World of the Kai?
• The ending of Angel Beats! reveals that Kanade received Otonashi's donated heart when he died, and died some time after he did. This contradicts the previously established fact that Angel has been at the school for a long time, whereas Otonashi first arrived at the start, unless you believe the theory that people don't necessarily go to the afterlife as soon as they die.
• In Ginga Densetsu Weed, at one point it's revealed that Gin chose some Identical Strangers to impersonate him and the other leaders. The plot hole in this is, why didn't the other dogs smell the difference? There is no way they could mimic the sent of the dogs they were pretending to be. This whole plot point seems to happen just to make Gin's son Weed, and by extension the audience, think Gin is dead for a while, in some kind of cheap attempt to shock the audience.
• Doubt has Hajime using Haruka's corpse to make Yuu think Mitsuki has been killed. The problem with that is that Haruka was decapitated, meaning there'd be no way for the rope he used to hang her to hold her up.
• Judge has a rather massive one. At the start, Hiro is tied up and thinks to himself about his surrounding and how someone knocked him out on the way from school. This creates a massive hole when it's revealed that Hiro is one of the two people organised the entire scenario. In other words, not only did he tie himself up for no reason, but he's thinking about something that literally did not happen.
• Pokémon:
  • Episode N features Reshiram being reawakened as a big plot point... and yet both versions of the 14th movie feature Reshiram as a prominent character, who is also awakened in them. While the canonicity of the movies is debatable, there has been evidence in the show to suggest they are (such as Mewtwo Returns being a direct sequel to the first movie, Ash's Aura first mentioned in Lucario and the Mystery of Mew playing a role in a few episodes and another episode having Dawn own an item she had bought in The Rise Of Darkrai), thus making the movie's status in canon questionable at best (not helped by the duality gimmick making them interchangeable).
  • Genesect and the Legend Awakened features a character whose whole existence is one — Mewtwo. The first movie and its prologue (which wasn't included in the American version) clearly establishes its Mewtwo as a unique specimen — it was cloned from the DNA of a very rare (and near extinct) Pokémon, said DNA was altered in a specific way to make it even more powerful, the final result was lucky to have not died some time after being created (unlike its fellow clones), and it finally blew up the lab with all personnel and research inside, ensuring there were no plans, prototype or backup. And for good measure, Mewtwo Returns had it wipe the minds of the organisation that commissioned his creation, ensuring no effort could be made to recreate him. Despite this, the Mewtwo seen in Gensect and the Legend Awakened is physically identical to the original, with no backstory or explanation for why or how this is the case despite the aforementioned factors beyond "scientists made it with Mew's DNA". Who these scientists are, how they got Mew DNA or why they made Mewtwo to begin with isn't explained either. [NOTE] This is entirely incorrect as a special episode was released even in English revealing Team Plasma had created this new Mewtwo (Nu Two) as well as the Genesect who themselves appeared in the Main Series serving Plasma during the N arc.
• Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Destiny: The explanation for Kira surviving the Freedom Gundam's destruction is that he deactivated the nuclear reactor before it exploded. Even ignoring that that is in no way possible, there is a massive plot hole created by this explanation. When the Freedom is pierced, a massive explosion occurs that knocks the Minerva (a fair distance away) back, heavily damaging the attacking Impulse and leaving a visible mushroom cloud. But if the reactor never went off, what caused the explosion?
  • Adding to that is that Kira is left completely unharmed (if unconscious) after doing this. Yet, later on, when Athrun pulls this same trick with a non nuclear powered mech, he spends the next several episodes nearly dead in a hospital bed.
  • This isn't even the first time Kira pulled such a trick: back in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, his Strike Gundam was grappled and self-destructed upon by Athrun Zala's Aegis Gundam, and for several episodes his friends thought he was dead. When he turns up alive, the explanation given for his survival is that a set of emergency blast shutters protected the cockpit from the worst of the explosion, but he was still injured and needed medical attention. However, when his friends on the Archangel found the Strike, the cockpit had practically been reduced to molten slag by the heat of the blast, leaving it very dubious that anyone (even a Designer Baby) could have survived such intense heat.
    • Making this one a two-fer, the manga Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Astray, designed as a sidestory companion piece, showed that protagonist Lowe Guele was the one who rescued Kira from the Strike Gundam by cutting open the cockpit and got him the medical attention he needed. When the Archangel crew found the Strike, it hasn't been touched since the battle ended and they also had to cut open the cockpit.
• The manga version of Neon Genesis Evangelion had a gigantic one in its final chapter: If Shinji remembers everything that happened to him before the world was reconstructed, why doesn't he recognize Asuka and Kensuke? Sure, Eva is a Mind Screw, but there's a difference between mind screws and making no logical sense.
• Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School is full of them:
  • Late into the series, it is confirmed that the Monokuma message from the beginning of the series is a recording. This completely fails to explain why Monokuma was clearly able to respond to the charcters.
  • Komaeda suddenly returns part-way through the anime, knowing everything about Junko's plan despite being overseas for the entirety of it. How he could possibly know is not even given a handwave.
  • The brainwashing software has highly inconsistent effects. The initial effects shown are that it literally forces the victims to do things despite them still being conscious, only when Class 77-B get brainwashed it's presented as if they're not even aware of their actions (except Komaeda, for no explained reason). Then, when it shows up in the Future Arc, it's presented as a full-on Mind Rape instead.
  • It is revealed near the end that the killing game was supposed to push Mitarai into broadcasting the Hope Video. Nowhere is it explained how Mitarai was supposed to even learn about the killing game, when he wasn't supposed to be a participant and the killing game wasn't being broadcast.
  • At the end of the series, it is revealed that Kirigiri survived her poisoning with Seiko Kimura's antagonist. According to Komaeda, the antagonist was made during the killing game...only there is absolutely no window of opportunity when Kimura could have made such an antagonist.
• The plot of Tohyo Game requires one of the main characters to be tremendously stupid. Marina transfers into Shuusuke's class because her mother, the Sole Survivor of the previous game, was murdered by Wakaba, Shuusuke's girlfriend and the Big Bad, and Marina is pursuing revenge. Only problem is...why didn't she tell the other the circumstances behind the game, or simply kill Wakaba? Even if you argue that no one would believe her (which would still be infinitely preferable to being extremely cryptic), she clearly suspected Wakaba to be the Votekeeper, and displays no hesitance towards killing. Even arguing that the program that the game functions around would kill everyone in response (unlikely, given the description given makes it sound like the Votekeeper needs to be alive for the program to work), Marina is shown to have literally no self-preservation outside of getting revenge.
• One Piece:
  • When Ace fights Blackbeard on Banaro Island, Ace is horrified that Blackbeard's Devil Fruit is able to negate his ability to phase through attacks with his Logia-type fruit. This contradicts the later introduction of Armament Haki, the last type of Haki to be shown in action, as well as the fact that Ace had fought people like Jimbei and Whitebeard who had been able to injure him, and is in fact revealed in supplementry material to be a user himself.
  • In the Thriller Bark arc, Sanji says that in the past, he'd read a book about Devil Fruits, and decided that only the Clear-Clear Fruit's powers of Invisibility was worth losing the ability to swim. This contradicts the Baratie arc, in which Sanji was shocked to hear that Luffy wouldn't be able to swim, meaning that he hadn't heard about the Devil Fruits' weakness (or possibly Devil Fruits in general).
  • Early into the Summit War Arc, the crew meets Silvers Reyleigh, Gol D. Roger's former first mate, who tells them about Roger's life story and exploits. When Robin asks him if they read the Poneglyphs, Reyleigh says they didn't, and that Roger just used a mysterious hidden instinct to guide him. Except we later learn the crew did read the Poneglyphs through Kozuki Oden, and not only is reading a set of the Poneglyph's nessecary to get the coordinates to Laugh Tale, but Roger even recruited Oden into his crew explicitly with the purpose of doing just that. There is zero explanation as to why Reyleigh would hide this information, espcially when he fully admits to knowing the truth behind the Void Century shortly beforehand, and is shown clearly invested in the possibility of Luffy and his crew finding the One Piece.
  • Right at the start of the raid on Onigashima, Jimbei, who'd last been seen at the end of the previous arc holding back Big Mom's forces to let the rest of the crew escape while promising to reunite with everyone at Wano, suddenly shows up completely uninjured and ready to rejoin. No explanation is ever given as to where in the world he was, when the Straw Hats were able to sail to Wano with a heavily damaged ship and no helmsman or shipwright in just a few days, and it's been two weeks since that point.
  • Near the end of the Wano Arc, it is revealed that Luffy's Devil Fruit, thought the entire series to be the Gum-Gum Fruit, is actually the Human-Human Fruit: Model Nika, an extremely powerful Mythical Zoan fruit which's true identity had been kept hidden by the World Government. Besides coming out of nowhere, the twist contradicts multiple events from across the series:
    • A major plot point in Luffy's fight with Enel is that Luffy's Rubber Man body enables him to No-Sell Enel's electric attacks, forcing Enel to rely on other methods to fighting him. This power is then referenced multiple times after, including Wano itself. However, if Luffy's fruit was a Zoan, which specifically transform the users into animals, how is this possible? While the manga does provide the Handwave the Nika's body has properties akin to rubber to enable his Toon Physics, that still should leave him a human being still, not someone with a body literally made of rubber as previously stated. One has to seriously stretch the imagination to assume that Luffy could be a insulator.
    • During Ennis Lobby, it's established that the name of a Devil Fruit is known by the user after they consume it, a fact proven when Kaku and Kalifa are given fruit, and know the name of them in spite of no one else knowing what the fruit served to them were. With that in mind how did Luffy not know his actual fruit's name? Even considering that he was told that it was the Gum-Gum Fruit by Shanks' crew, Luffy is ordinarily too ignorant to base his assumptions off that, and yet he styled all his attacks off the fake name.
    • If the fruit was so valuable that Who's Who, the CP9 member assigned to guard it while it was being transported, was thrown in prison just for failing to prevent its theft, why was Luffy's capture not a higher priority, especially considering Luffy is both a D, and the son of the worlds most wanted criminal? Despite the fact that he spent weeks sailing East Blue and fought the Marines shortly after he set sail, Luffy never even had a bounty until he took out Arlong, and even then only become a major target after he showed the Marines up in Alabasta by defeating Crocodile. Considering the World Government committed a full-scale genocide of Robin's home just because of their research into the Void Century, and then gave an 80 Million bounty to an 8-year-old just because she was capable of reading Ponyglyphs, the lack of any kind of urgency regarding such a major secret is baffling.
• In Your Name, Mitsuha seems genuinely surprised to see Tokyo for the first time in Taki's body. However, chronologically speaking, this should be the second time she's switched, because for the first time, her friends have told her that she'd gone to school with her bed hair and whatnot. This opens the possibility that, either all her memory for the first time is gone, or her soul didn't switch but simply vanished. Either that, or the movie is a little (perhaps deliberately) chronologically messy.
• By the end of Attack on Titan, Eren, using the Rumbling, was able to destroy entire contintents and 80% of the world's population before he is defeated by the Alliance of Eldians and Marleyans and killed by Mikasa. Despite this, Mikasa was able to take Eren's decapitated head thousands of miles across the obliterated continent of Marley and crossed the ocean back to Paradis to bury him on foot with no food or water and apparently beneath the notice of the Paradisians.

Comic Books

• Captain Britain and MI13: In issue #10, Doctor Doom and Dracula are having a meeting on The Moon (no, this Dracula doesn't have a moon base). Doom warns Dracula not to attack him because he has all sorts of defenses against him, including splinters of The True Cross embedded in his armor. It's been made explicit that religious artifacts are useless against vampire if the wielder lacks faith in what that artifact represents. A fight with the X-Men showed Dracula laughing off Wolverine's sign of the cross, but being repulsed when devout Catholic Nightcrawler did the same, so this is something Dracula knows about. It's equally explicit that Doom's only faith is in Doom, so it makes no sense to throw that detail in. Clearly, that was Actually a Doombot.
• DC vs. Vampires: The series has plenty of incidents of dubiously in-canon or in-characterization moments. But the biggest is Vampire!Hal Jordan using his ring at all, let alone using it to murder Zan and Barry Allen. For one, the ring should've left Hal the moment he turned, due to being (un)dead.^note There is precident for a zombie GL, but that was explictly a special case. For another, GL rings are hard-wired against the use of lethal force. The ring should've straight up refused Vampire!Hal's commands. And yet still, the rings have been shown to report any use of lethal force (intentional or accidental) directly to the Guardians, so Vampire!Hal should've had a squad of Green Lanterns showing up within minutes of his murder of Zan. We have yet to see an explanation as to how Vampire!Hal could overcome any of this.
• JLA: Act of God: There are numerous plot holes and discrepancies throughout the series, none of which are ever resolved or even realized:
  • The black light event is specifically stated to have removed all superpowers while leaving all technology unaffected, but Green Lantern's ring is a completely technological device that is also rendered inoperable, while other characters' futuristic, alien, or otherwise fantastic technology like Booster Gold's costume and Blue Beetle's scarab work just fine, and nobody ever mentions the discrepancy.
    • To add the confusion, we see Cyborg-Superman flying around completely unaffected, when Cyborg-Superman is actually just a metahuman who has a superpower that allows him to inhabit robotic or cybernetic bodies, in this case a clone of Superman's body that has been partially robotized. In the very least his kryptonian powers should be gone. A far more likely scenario would have him just completely disappear and leave a lifeless cybernetic body behind since his one superpower that allows him to survive as an energy being would be neutralized with the black light event. And why aren't the characters more worried that there's a psychopath with Superman's powers flying around with no one strong enough or wielding magic to stop him?
  • On a more fundamental level of the plot, many characters lose abilities that are not superpowers. J'onn J'onzz's many abilities (Shapeshifting, flight, telepathy, Super-Strength, intangibility, etc.) are all standard abilities of his natural Martian physiology; yes, they are far beyond any human ability, but a human's ability to see is far beyond that of many animals here on earth and nobody went blind, and no gorilla suddenly lost the ability to lift a large weight, even though their natural physiology is much larger than Homo Sapiens. Like the Martian Manhunter, the powers of the various Kryptonians (Superman, Supergirl), Aquaman and other figures are also natural abilities that are not "super" for their species in any way shape or form, yet they lost them as well.
  • On a different level, it was also stated that the black light event removed all mystical and/or magical people from the world, implying that this is some sort of magical event that they could have dealt with, except Wonder Woman is still here. Wonder Woman's powers are mythological in nature, granted to her by the Greek Gods by way of the Amazons, she is herself a mystical being. The most basic part of the story, the black light event which de-powered the superheroes, is inconsistent, incongruous and illogical, and the characters never even realize it.

• Marvel Zombies:
  • Ms. Marvel gets killed twice. When questioned about this the writers claimed, tongue-in-cheek, that one was her identical twin sister.
  • That's not the only life/death inconsistency in the series. A zombiefied Black Cat is first seen getting a hole punched in her by Iron Fist, but then an alive-and-well Black Cat appears on the Helicarrier. Luke Cage also mentions having eaten Doctor Strange, but we later see Strange is still alive. And finally, a Zombiefied Dazzler was seen the the original Ultimate Fanstastic Four event, but the prequel Marvel Zombie vs. Army of Darkness, we see Dazzler was bitten by Enchantress, but Doctor Doom obliterated her before she could become a zombie.
• Poet Anderson: The Dream Walker: Ayo is fascinated by the concept of rain, as it doesn't naturally occur in the Dream World the same as the Waking World. In the Poet short film, which the comics serve as a prequel to, it does rain in the Dream World city of Genesis. As Ayo is a Dream World native, how would she not know what rain is?
• Spider-Man: One More Day has plenty, but the main one is probably how Spider-Man tries to get help from various superheroes around the world to help Aunt May, who's been shot. None of them are able to heal a bullet wound, despite the fact that they have the best technology, scientific and outright magical skills of anyone on Earth — among them a character who had previously saved the life of someone whose heart was torn out of their chest. No matter how you look at it, it is simply impossible that the greatest scientists, wizards and superheroes in the world are unable to heal a bullet wound.
• Transmetropolitan: The resolution is balanced on a person who disintegrated themselves entirely immediately after performing an assassination being photographed several minutes after the assassination took place. With a camera that, depending on how you read the series's timeline, the photographer may not have owned yet.
• Wolverine: A revelation says that Logan's adamantium is actually toxic and his healing factor is constantly having to counteract blood poisoning. Not only should a non-reactive indestructible metal not work like that (there's a reason metals like titanium and stainless steel are used in surgical implants), but it creates a big fat plot hole in the perfectly healthy forms of Lady Deathstrike, Cyber, and Bullseye (all of whom have adamantium skeletons) and the formerly healthy Hammerhead (who had an adamantium skull). You could handwave Deathstrike and Cyber (both being cyborgs who could presumably have systems that could deal with the toxicity). The otherwise normal human Bullseye and Hammerhead? Not so much. There have also been a few cases where Wolverine has had his mutant power supressed (such as in the cartoon), yet retains his claws and skeleton due to them not being mutant powers. Why does this not cause him to rapidly die from adamatine poisoning, now that his Healing Factor is gone?
• Wonder Woman Vol. 2: During "The Witch and the Warrior" Diana needs to recover her lasso in order to have Superman touch it in order to undo his brainwashing. This would make more sense if brainwashed Superman hadn't taken the lasso from her with his bare hands to begin with, then held onto it for a second before tossing it to Silver Swan, all with no effect, despite the fact that the lasso should have broken through the brainwashing as soon as he touched it. ^note While the powers and mechanics of the lasso have changed quite a bit over the decades, in most continueties, including this one, touching it is enough to induce it's truth-compelling, mind-control breaking effects; it doesn't need to be wrapped around the person. The lasso then works perfectly once Diana's recovered it and lassos him with it.
• X-Men: In Chuck Austen's run on Uncanny X-Men Azazel needs to escape his dimension, so he does so by breeding teleporters to teleport him out... of the dimension he had to escape to breed them in the first place. To be fair, it's occasionally stated that he needs the teleporters to break his army out of the dimension. Consistency was never Austen's strong point.

Comic Strips

• Garfield: Nermal's home is unclear. Jon mentions a few times that Nermal lives on the farm with his parents, and yet every time Jon and Garfield visit Jon's parents, Nermal is nowhere to be seen, and Garfield tends to be ambivalent towards visits to the farm, despite his mortal enemy supposedly living there. Jon's folks and brother almost never visit Jon either, so what is Nermal doing in Jon's house, miles from his home, in literally every strip he appears in?

Fan Works

• Rosario Vampire: Brightest Darkness: In Act III, chapter 50, Kokoa has somehow become aware that Akua and Kahlua stole the Chrono Displacement spell from their father's secret archive for Kiria to use in his Evil Plan, when that information was never specifically revealed to them; while Tsukune and the others knew that Fairy Tale had acquired the spell, they were taken aback by the fact that it even still existed after allegedly being destroyed and outright questioned how Kiria acquired it.
• Harry Potter/Kingdom Hearts crossover Out Goes The Broomstick, In Comes The Gummi Ship has Harry fall to darkness by the Big Bad in its penultimate chapters - This is despite the fact that, earlier in the story, King Mickey told Harry he was one of the Princesses of Heart ^note Supposedly, he's the exception to the "princess" (read: female) requirement for the role
• Forged Destiny: Good Grief, where do we even start?:
  • Through most of the story Salem is frequently summoned through a ritual involving human sacrifice, but come Book 6 it's revealed she can grant wishes to anyone she wants even if they aren't aware of her existence, which is how Jaune received the amulet at the start of the story. The author attempts to Hand Wave the full implications of this in Chapter 7 of Book 7 by having Jaune postulate that Salem had already been summoned prior to Jaune stating his desires to her so as to avoid the problem of why the world isn't more affected due to her Jackass Genie shenanigans on an unsuspecting wisher, though this still doesn't explain why Cinder heard her voice at the festival amphitheater, nor the issue of why Salem would grant Jaune's wish at all instead of her original summoner's, and when he didn't know of her existence to make a wish to her to begin with. Word of God also states that Salem can stick around and grant wishes to anyone who makes them rather than just her summoner. However, this still doesn't settle any issues about why the world isn't already destroyed long before the story starts. ^note  The author even lists numerous ways a wish could be interpreted to kill everyone.
  • During the battle between Cinder and Jaune, where Jaune is stabbed and fuses with a sword, how or why Jaune is able to get back up and continue to function despite being impaled and thus leading to both organ damage and restricted blood flow (to say nothing of metal entering the blood stream) is never explained. Also comes up again in the opposite way when Jaune is made to constantly battle while wounded after being kidnapped by Raven, Jaune never attempts to seal his wounds by inserting and forging metal into them, as he did when fighting Cinder since that's apparently a valid medical option.
    • Attempted to be filled come Book 7 where it's revealed Jaune died in his fight with Cinder, and forging the magical sword with himself brought him back to life with his dual Class, not only does this utterly fail to address any of the above issues, but also leaves the rather obvious problem of how Jaune manages to use his forging skills to merge with the sword while already dead.
  • When the Levels of the rest of the Hunters are revealed, they often don't make sense in being near Jaune's as the story fails to show when and how they achieved them, and most of its members neither work as hard as Jaune nor are placed in the kind of dangerous situations he's frequently seen as often.
  • During Jaune's kidnapping, where he's continually pitted against Greycloaks while being wounded and sick, Jaune starts becoming addicted to Leveling and succumbing to Raven's view. Jaune's high Resilience score that supposedly provides mental fortitude, and frequently displaying a Skill that keeps him calm and focused during emotional and mental turmoil are notably absent through all of this. Hand Waved by the author as Word of God asserts it's Jaune's Resilience that even keeps him going as anyone else would just have broken, and give up. However YMMV, as no sign of this is indicated in the story itself, this explanation is pure assertion, and still has Jaune mentally cracking over a very short time, and over an issue of self-defense against enemies eager to kill him, which he has done several times before with no issues.
  • Also notable during Jaune's kidnapping and being introduced to Raven's gladiatorial system, is a complete lack of Grimm being spawned from all the death and general negativity with the Greycloaks camp, avoiding the issue of why they aren't constantly attacked. Also absent again, when Vale experiences a riot in protest over New Dawn's leader being attacked and kidnapped. As of Book 7, the Grimm have been entirely forgotten in the story.
  • Again in Book 7 where the beginning of the Book goes into how the Noble Classes controls the Labour Classes due to the former's high Cha stat compared to the latter's low Res stat. Come the climax of the Book many Labour Classes start rioting in Vale without a single attempt or explanation of why the Noble Classes don't just tell them to stop and go home which the Labourers should be compelled to obey. As of Book 7, when and how high Cha seems to work depends entirely on the plot.
    • This becomes especially glaring when in Book 9 a similar situation arises when one of Vale's walls fall to the Grimm and the Labour Caste become a panicked mob, only for Ozpin to calm everyone down into obedience with his Charisma.
  • Book 8 opens up with another major one as Ozpin explains how Leveling addiction is supposedly quite a common occurrence for Heroes, but not only is this never seen at any point earlier in the story where the early growth rate made Leveling more dramatic and easier, but also leaves the major issue of why there aren't thousands of Level-obsessed Ravens trying to rampantly murder everyone for more Exp, as well as how the Greycloaks can even form as an organization when by such explanations they'd easily turn and kill each other for more Levels till the whole group self-destructs. YMMV on whether this comes off as an Ass Pull for the sake of drama or not.
  • Book 9 opens with Jaune taking a break from constant forging not because he is physically unable to continue, he even notes that his Constitution would allow him to continue working longer, but because he is mentally exhausted. At this point, Jaune has the highest Resilience score in all of Remnant which is supposed to allow him to shrug off all negative mental effects, including exhaustion. Oobleck even mentioned in Book 1 that Resilience allowed members of the Labour Caste to continue working on their tasks for an extended period of time, and Jaune demonstrated this ability in Book 2 by working for hours without end in the buried Fang village when his Resilience was less than a fifth of what it is now.
• The Boy Who Cried Idiot:
  • Chandler refers to Martin as "the idiot" before he does anything stupid.
  • Everyone laughs at Lincoln for being "the book thrower", even though they saw that it was actually Martin, so logically, they should have laughed at him instead.
  • Lana tells Lynn Sr. that Lincoln is innocent when he's grounding him, even though she wasn't there when Martin threw the textbook or when the raccoons attacked Lincoln, so she had no way of knowing he was.
  • When Lincoln says in his sleep, "Take the boys' stuff with me", Martin, mistaking the Loud sisters for boys, takes their stuff. However, despite being prone to mistaking people's genders, Martin knows Lincoln is a boy, so logically he should have taken his stuff as well.
  • At the end of the story (the original ending), Martin says that he learned his lesson about lying, and includes claiming Lincoln was sleep-talking as one of his "lies". However, Martin didn't actually lie; he was truly stupid enough to believe the lies of Papa Wheelie and Chandler, and Lincoln really was sleep-talking.
  • Martin calls Clyde a hypocrite for calling his referring to Lincoln's breathing as music creepy, considering his "obsession with Lori". However, Martin doesn't know Clyde very well, and considering he thinks Lori is a boy, he probably doesn't know her name.
• Pokémon Strangled Red has Steven walking to Pallet Town via Cerulean City for the final scene. However, in Pokémon Red and Blue, it is impossible to walk back from Cerulean City to Mount Moon and Pewter City, and thus to Viridian City and Pallet Town. However, since Steven can swim without the aid of a Pokémon, it's possible that he can also make this return trip.

Films — Animation

• In Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch, Stitch rushes to leave the planet in a ship because he thinks he's turning evil. Along the way his ship crashes onto a random mountain, and somehow the regeneration pod needed to fix him is just sitting there on top of the mountain waiting for him, with no explanation as to how it got there or why it would be there on this random mountain in the middle of nowhere. One might assume it fell out of Stitch's ship, but we last saw the regeneration pod in Jumba's lab, and he rushed out without it as soon as it was finished to get Stitch. Even if he somehow sneaked it onto the ship offscreen in a very small viable time frame, the regen pod is completely unharmed from the crash and conveniently in a perfect upright position. It looks far more like somebody put it there than it being part of a crash site.
• In The Great Mouse Detective, Fidget somehow finds Olivia at Basil's apartment, yet it's evident that Ratigan did not instruct him to go there. The arch-villain was surprised when Fidget told him he ran into Basil at the toy shop, and obviously didn't realize that Basil was already working on this particular case. So why was Fidget spying on Olivia at Basil's apartment if Ratigan didn't tell him to do so? Though in all fairness, even if Ratigan didn't order Fidget to go there, he did commission Fidget to find Olivia, so it was possible that Fidget would guess she would be at Basil's.
• The Little Mermaid (1989): Ariel is fully capable of writing, so even if she can't speak, why didn't she just write a note to Eric that she was the person who saved him? Even the creators of the movie admitted to missing this oversight and just hoped that audiences would glance over it.
• Disney's Beauty and the Beast:
  • A fairy curses the prince so that he will remain a Beast unless someone falls in love with him before his 21st birthday. Lumiere says, "Ten years we've been rusting," yet that would mean the prince was cursed at the age of eleven, but he looks so much older than that in the painting he slashes after his transformation.
  • The distance between the palace and the town is inconsistent. Maurice leaves town to go to the fair in the morning, gets lost in the woods, and stumbles on the palace late at night. Belle goes looking for him on horseback the next morning, and again reaches the palace after dark. But when Belle and Maurice return home, they leave at night and get back that same night, and the mob led by Gaston reaches the castle again that same night. Then again, how can anyone miss seeing a giant castle on a hill?
• The Lion King:
  • Each new addition to the canon introduces new plot holes, though the first one is not immune, such as the fact Scar blamed Simba for the death of Mufasa without explaining exactly to the Pride how he is supposed to have murdered him as a little cub^note Some still justify it because Simba admitted it plainly, and the lionesses were supposedly too shocked to think properly or why the ghost of Mufasa did not tell directly the truth to Simba like in Hamlet, rather than the enigmatic "Remember who you are"^note It's more a Series Continuity Error since the Production of the first film clearly intended him to be more like a hallucination, but the sequels made him real . They are particularly fond of the "add new characters that are absent in other films without having giving a logical explanation why" variety of plot hole, but they also like the "character disappears without comment" variety of plot hole too. You could say they are all off-screen, but it's quite a stretch and a poor Hand Wave.
  • The Lion King II: Simba's Pride introduces a pride of lions that supposedly supported Scar in the first movie. Meanwhile, the hyenas disappear, which was not a plot hole because it was explained that the hyenas left after Scar was killed, but The Lion Guard made this a plot hole because there is some left to antagonize the Pride Lands. Meanwhile, Simba's mother disappears without an explanation.
  • The Lion King 1 ½ retells the story of the The Lion King from the point of view of Timon and Pumbaa (mainly Timon) in a manner that contradicts some of the first film's events (and even their own dedicated TV series). However, the production claimed they did not necessarily think of the film as being canon, but more like a parody. The fact Timon and Pumbaa are watching it at a private screening in a cinema talks for itself.
  • The Lion Guard introduces Kiara's brother Kion, his four friends, and two lioness cubs, who all should logically appear in Simba's Pride sinceThe Lion Guard takes place during Simbas Pride, but don't. Kovu, Vitani, Nuka, and Zira all appear and talk to Kion, yet make no mention of him in Simbas Pride. It also says Scar led the old Lion Guard and killed the other members of the Guard, without explaining why he was not exiled for this. Admittedly, the great kings of the past took away his powers, but this is the lion equivalent of confiscating his weapons to a serial killer.
• In Disney's Hercules, if Hades is surrounded by souls of the dead in the Underworld, why didn’t he check to ensure Hercules's soul came in when Pain and Panic claimed to have killed him? Did he not suspect anything when Hercules was never amongst his collection of deceased people?

• Monsters University.
  • Mike saying "You've been jealous of my good looks since the fourth grade" to Sully in the original film doesn't make sense anymore when this movie establishes that Sully and Mike first met in college.
  • A more minor example is that the ending of this film makes it clear that Mike and Sully worked for the Abominable Snowman as interns for mail work at the scream factory. Yet when they run into the Abominable Snowman again in the original film, they act like complete strangers.
• Don Bluth's film The Secret of NIMH has numerous plot holes in the story, some of them being a result of changes from the source material of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.
  • The most notable is the source of the Amulet Nicodemus gives Mrs. Brisby. In fact, Nicodemus' magic powers in general. The film never explains where either came from. It's not even addressed if Nicodemus got those abilities as a side effect of the injection (which would raise questions about why the other rats got no such abilities) or if he was intelligent enough to learn them on his own. Years later, Don Bluth handwaved the presence of the amulet in an interview:
    "With regard to the amulet, it is a metaphor for believing in one's self. Remember the quote, "Courage of the heart is very rare, the stone has a power when it's there." It helps symbolize her courage and the power of the stone to help rescue her children...a miracle, if you will. God stuff. Granted, it isn't in the original novel, but we felt that it was much more powerful. Nicodemus says it was Jonathan's, but really just to get her to accept it. We didn't really think it was necessary to explain it further. Seems like we would eat up too much screen time to tell the history of the amulet, when the story was about an innocent widow mouse, who, thru her journey would find out that she has the courage to rescue her own family. Regarding magic, we really believe that animation calls for some magic, to give it a special "fantastic" quality. The stone or amulet is just a method of letting the audience know that Mrs. Brisby has found 'Courage of the Heart'. Magic? Maybe. Spiritual? Yes."
  • The film never really makes a distinction about how much more intelligent the rats are than other animals, aside from the obvious results of scientific progress and the self consciousness of humanlike responsibility shifted onto them. The other animals are clearly capable of communication, rational thought and thinking skills like decision making and deductive reasoning. Did the injection simply give the rats a bigger idea of comprehension than the other animals?
  • If the Rats wanted to leave no trace behind of their lair, how were they going to take care of hiding something as massive as the council room?
  • Why is it that Mrs. Shrew recommends Mrs. Brisby see the Great Owl when Mr. Ages makes it clear that no one else has seen the Great Owl and lived to tell about it? How would she have known If he was wise, or if it was even sensible to ask for his help if he had that kind of reputation?
  • And why does Mr. Ages have a makeshift lab built inside a giant piece of farm equipment? Since he doesn't like visitors anyway, wouldn't It have been safer to keep the lab within the boundaries of the rats' lair, instead of putting himself in a situation that could call to attention his above average knowledge of science and medicine to outsiders?^note also note that in the book, he lived in a much more sensible hideout—an old, long abandoned building.
• In Don Bluth's Rock-A-Doodle, the farm animals believe that the rooster Chanticleer causes the sun to rise when he crows. Except one day Chanticleer doesn't crow and the sun rises anyway, so the animals make fun of him until he leaves. Then while he's gone, the sun never rises on the farm because Chanticleer isn't there to crow. So why did the sun come up that one time?
• Don Bluth's A Troll in Central Park has a few plot holes too:
  • How did Gnorga even know where to banish Stanley to when Llort didn't even tell her where it was to begin with, and only gave a general description of how horrible it was? And how did Llort even learn about New York in the first place or even know if it was as bad as he made it out to be, since the Troll Kingdom is clearly a far ways off from any place humans would be around?^note A reasonable explanation could be since her magic thumb can probably grant wishes like Stanley's can, it's likely she wished it up and it was never said that Llort even knew of Central Park to begin with.
  • The source of Stanley's "prestidigitation" powers, which is not explained and comes out of nowhere, with no foreshadowing, midway through the film. Earlier he was shown to have magic, but only the kind that could grow plants. ^note It's possible that the green thumb isn't simply a plant power, but a power that can make one's dreams reality, which embodies Stanley's whole philosophy on life. He only uses it for plants at first because his dream is to cover the world in greenery.
  • While Gnorga going to New York without bringing other trolls can be written off due to her impatient, temperamental personality, did she even consider that sending a tornado to destroy Central Park, located in one of the most densely populated cities on Earth, all just to capture a rogue troll and two kids, would attract a lot of unwanted attention? Even the next day, after she's defeated, no one seems to be raising a stink about how Central Park has been completely razed. ^note It may be less that she didn't consider it and more that she just doesn't care how her actions affect the world or others. She IS a villain after all.
• The Rugrats Movie: When Stu and Grandpa go to the airport control tower and check to see if the kids are on the plane where the crate is, but find out the goat is there instead. This makes no sense; There's no possible way the goat would've made it on to the plane, as x-ray scanners at airport security would've detected it.
• In Felix the Cat: The Movie, The Master Cylinder, who was a minor villain in the TV Felix cartoons, makes a decidedly abrupt, completely out-of-left-field appearance for the final battle, now a heavily souped up weapon of the Duke of Zill. It isn't explained how or why he was brought into the dimension of Oriana (since the Duke clearly does not have access to Dimensporter technology, nor would it explain how he could have found the Master Cylinder, since he lives on the moon) in the first place, or if he even has any connection to the Duke's own cylinders.
• Starchaser: The Legend of Orin:
  • The crystals are very volatile and ignite by laser fire, and yet the slaves mine them with powerful laser jackhammers.
  • Orin reacts at one point like if he knows what vacuum is. How would he know if he’s been a slave in a subterranean world all his life?
• In Tom and Jerry and the Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West somehow knows Tom and Jerry's names without being told. Then again, she is a witch.
• The film version of Horton Hears a Who!, Horton crosses a rickety wooden footbridge (the only way to get to Mt. Nool), destroying it in the process. Later in the film, the other characters somehow follow him, despite the bridge being gone. It’s possible though that they found an alternative route to get to Horton.
• The conflict of My Little Pony: Equestria Girls happens because Sunset Shimmer has inexplicably up-to-date knowledge given she's been stuck in an Alternate Universe until then. She knew Twilight Sparkle despite Twilight not becoming Princess Celestia's student until Sunset fled. She knew that there was a princess summit going on at the time, providing an opportunity to steal the Element of Magic. Most inexplicably, she knew said Element was rediscovered, what it looked like (it changed its appearance), and that taking it to said Alternate Universe would let it be useful in her plans.
• Daddy, I'm a Zombie 2 has an All Just a Dream ending just like the first movie, even though the villain showed up before the dream started.
• Toy Story 2 created one, thanks to fleshing out Woody's backstory from the original film. Woody almost certainly had to have been owned by someone else besides Andy (due to the age of Woody's Roundup, an obviously fifties puppet show Western), probably Andy's father, but Andy is the only owner Woody talks about. Unless Andy's dad shoved Woody in a box the day after he got him (unlikely for a child of the fifties with less entertainment options), that is. It was only years later revealed that Word of God had an EXTREMELY convoluted backstory to explain this, revealing that exactly such a thing did happen (in a way) and that Woody is a one-of-a-kind prototype. Of course, this is never at any point mentioned in the movies themselves.
• The Emoji Movie has one that completely invalidates the character arc of one of its main characters, namely the hacker emoji Jailbreak. See, Jailbreak is actually a princess emoji who ran away to become her own person as female emojis have always only been allowed to be princess or bride emojis and nothing else. The plot hole comes in when you realize that there are plenty of female versions of other emojis seen throughout the smartphone, not the least of which includes two major characters: Gene the hero's mother, a female "Meh" emoji, and the movie's main villain, a female happy face emoji. The result is that Jailbreak's entire motivation winds up coming off as nonsensical.
• Due to its rushed production, BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui has a number of confusing bits, mainly concerning the true identity of Turaga Dume. He's shown serving the evil Makuta, whom he talks to through a mirror. Later, we find out Dume is Makuta, having stolen Dume's mask, but when the heroes find the real Dume, his mask is on his face. The latter is mostly artistic licence born out of necessity — viewers wouldn't recognize Dume without his mask, and the designers had created no maskless CG models for the characters, so the animators had no choice but to show Dume with his mask still on. Makuta talking to himself through a mirror makes no sense, though. Some have rationalized that the mirror "reflected the false Dume's true self", but the animation actually shows both Dume's reflection and Makuta's eyes separate from each other. The film's novelization reveals that only when "Dume" looks into the mirror for the second time, wearing the stolen mask, were we supposed to see that his reflection is Makuta's. The animation messes this scene up by showing Dume's body with Makuta's mask looking into the mirror, ruining the reveal and making the whole existence of the mirror pointless. But even if the animation followed the novel, Makuta talking to himself in the previous scene would still make no sense. Some fans theorize he was talking to another Makuta who happened to have the same voice, but that's stretching things.
• WALL•E: The entire basis of the film is that humanity left the heavily polluted Earth to allow the robots to clean it. Problem is, is that it's a major plot point that the excursion, which was only supposed to last five years, went for 700 years. Thing is though, if they overstayed their time by that long, how were they able to stay supplied and not die out in the intervening time? Even if you assume that the Axiom had extra supplies, it's highly doubtful at best that the creators would have the foresight to pack so far ahead of the planned time.
• Pinocchio:
  • It is never explained how Jiminy Cricket somehow missed seeing the hundreds of boys transforming into donkeys and being rounded up by the Coachman and his minions; in Pinocchio and Lampwick's case, they could've been in the pool hall the entire time it occurred and managed to avoid hearing the noise.
  • It seems odd that J. Worthington Foulfellow would be so surprised to see a talking puppet, because he's a talking, upright-walking, fully-dressed fox.
• In South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut when Cartman's encounters Kenny's spirit before he attends the La Resistance meeting he is seen packing a rope and a mirror in his backpack, these are items The Mole requested they bring him, however this takes place before the boys met The Mole.
• In Quest for Camelot when Count Ruber is killed when he accidentally sticks Excalibur back into the stone it came from, it released an energy that restored everyone, the mechanical minions and Bladebeak turned back to normal, King Arthur’s arm is healed, and Devon and Cornwall temporarily separate before going back to being conjoined twins, but why didn’t it restore Garrett’s sight? He wasn’t born that way it happened when he got kicked in the face by a panic stricken horse, so logically he should’ve gotten his sight back.
• Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker has a small one created by a last minute change: after the end of the flashback scene Harley Quinn falls into a bottomless pit and seemingly dies. However, the ending shows her alive and well as an old lady, and she's apparently become a decent, law abiding citizen, as she goes to bail out her grandkids from jail and the guards don't immediately tackle her. This scene wasn't originally planned, but was added since the creators couldn't bear to kill her off. This ends up creating some friction with a scene right after the flashback where the comissioner says that she was never seen again and is presumed deceased. Given that we see at the end she is still alive and not in hiding, we'll just have to assume that the Comissioner either somehow didn't know or was lying out of fear that the Batfamily might try to take revenge if they knew.
• In Cars, it's a major plot point that Lightning McQueen does not know how to counter steer, or even understand how it works ("Turn right to go left"). But he does - in the Piston Cup championship race that opens the movie, he uses that move to maintain control after he loses his rear tires.
• Supervillains clearly exist alongside superheroes in the world The Incredibles (even if none seem to have powers for no given reason,) but it was never explained what happened to them when superheroes were forced into retirement because society has had enough of their actions causing them problems. Supervillains would obviously not go along with the rules to go into retirement like the superheroes, but from the passing of the superhero registration laws to the rise of Syndrome in the first film over a decade later, there is no mention of supervillain activity and, outside of a Freeze-Frame Bonus where a newspaper article mentions high crime rates, society seems to be continuing just fine.
• Zootopia has a rather glaring contradiction between its core plot and worldbuilding; Judy, a rabbit, is explicitly stated to be the first bunny, and indeed, first small animal, to join the Zootopia police department, with the rest of the officers scoffing at her supposed uselessness due to her size. Yet the city of Zootopia has whole neighborhoods built for certain animal species that would be inhospitable, to say the least, to the large mammals that comprise the police force, notably "Little Rodentia" which is built to so small a scale even Judy narrowly avoids crushing several residents and buildings while chasing a criminal thought it. Who polices those areas?
• In Hugo the Hippo Aban-Khan shoots the hippos to death when they become a problem for the townspeople, the reason they were brought over was to kill the sharks that were eating the workers which prevented goods from being shipped to the town, if Khan had guns the whole time why didn’t he use them on the sharks?

Films — Live-Action

• The Babysitter: Killer Queen culminates with Bee revealing the reason she "originally" made a Deal with the Devil. It was all so Cole could eventually hook up with Phoebe. Except, in the original film, Bee tried to kill Cole and, during the sequel, he nearly dies several times - which contradicts Bee's alleged objective^note Plus, in the first Babysitter film, Bee said she wanted to gain strength. There was no mention of Phoebe whatsoever.
• Contrary to popular belief, Citizen Kane averts this. Supposedly, the media somehow knows what Kane's last word was, despite the fact that he was Dying Alone. However, Raymond the butler later says he heard the word, implying that the scene was shot from his point of view. It's just not until the end of the movie that he mentions this.
• Blood Over Water began shooting in mid-September of 2009. Following events closely, it could not have happened in more than a week. But the characters' clothing betrays rather quickly that it suddenly went from summer to winter in only a week. Essentially, given the background elements that betray the relative time period, any Farmer's Almanac for Big Rapids could call shenanigans on the time stretch caused by trying to represent the passing of a single week over the course of four months.
• Numerous scenes in the remake of The Stepford Wives (2004) suggest that, as in the original, the wives have been replaced by robotic duplicates. However the ending reveals that they have all 'merely' had microchips planted in their brains, which completely contradicts the ATM wife earlier in the film. And the robotic boobs. The plot hole in this movie is a case of test audiences being idiots. Apparently the movie did originally use the robotic duplicate ending but the ultimate verdict was that it was unsatisfactory and was thus changed to be a happy win despite the fact that it completely changes and tramples the theme and message of the book.
• Battlefield Earth is notorious for containing an alarming number of plot holes, which are quite ridiculous even inside the framework of the story. A few, for the record:
  • An alien race concerned with nothing but mining the Earth for all its gold deposits has somehow overlooked Fort Knox the whole time they've been on the planet (that's almost 1,000 years, folks).
  • The human resistance movement is able to defeat the alien overlords with the help of human technology and innovation that's over 1,000 years old, despite the fact that humans 1,000 years ago (who actually built the technology and had experience using it) somehow failed to repel the dreadlocked menace and were supposedly defeated in only nine minutes. Oh, and it turns out that jet fuel lasts thousands of years without evaporating or degrading. To say nothing of the jets not rusting or otherwise showing any signs of age.
  • The defeat of the entire alien race depends on accepting a truly batshit and very false concept about radiation being explosive. Technically it's not the radiation that's explosive, it's some of the chemicals in the alien atmosphere that react explosively in the presence of the kind of radiation produced by uranium. Not much better and never explicitly stated in the movie, though.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Ant-Man: The super-science behind the Pym Particles and Antman Suit is described as manipulating the space between atoms. This establishes two things: 1) mass is conserved (the only change is density) and 2) there should be a lower limit to his shrinking ability. The movie ignores this as needed allowing Scott Lang punch people without hitting like a bullet, ride ants when he should crush them, and shrink down to near Planck length at the climax of the film when he explicitly should not. The ant and Thomas the Tank Engine toy that get hit with size-increasing weapons should have floated away, having become far lighter than air, and Hank Pym walks around with an apparently functional T-34 on his keychain like it doesn't still weigh twenty-five tons. In short, the explanation simply makes no sense at all, and Comics generally Hand Wave it by suggesting that Hank Pym doesn't understand how the Particles work either and any explanation he gives is just nonsense. Given how consistently his explanation is proven to be obviously incorrect, one could argue it falls into Blatant Lies rather than plot holes.
  • Captain America: Civil War: During the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, we get a look at some of the advanced technology floating around in this universe including biometric scanners, retinal scanners and holographic meshes that can totally disguise Natasha's face. During the events of Civil War... Zemo sneaks onto the ultra secure base where Bucky is being held, apparently using nothing more complex than a fake passport. When Tony learns the truth, we find out that all Zemo did was meet the psychiatrist at the airport, killed him in the hotel and then stole his ID. He didn't hack any computers to change files as Tony can immediately pull up the correct ones. This means that after catching Bucky and sending for the UN's best shrink, the CIA - did not arrange to meet the man at the airport, or at his hotel, didn't know what the real man looked like before he arrived, didn't check with anyone what the real man looked like before he arrived and when Zemo turned up... they let him in to speak with the most dangerous, wanted criminal in history without so much as checking his finger prints, or googling the real dude on Facebook to see if his pictures line up. There is NO good explanation how Zemo could get into that base without the use of advanced technology.
  • Partway through WandaVision, it is revealed that after his death in Infinity War, Vision's body was taken by S.W.O.R.D for their experiments, leading to Wanda discovering it and subsequently the events of the series. Except Vision's death took place in Wakanda, a country which an organization linked to the United States government would have no reason to operate out of (least of all because S.W.O.R.D was founded to combat space-related threats), and in the presence of multiple Avengers, some of whom even watched him die. Which raises the question, how exactly did his body end up there? Even considering the explanation in the series that Vision specifically requested he not be rebuilt in the event of his passing, one would assume the Avengers would have some personal interest in recovering and honouring the body of their friend and teammate, and would have at least some issue with it being experimented on, especially Tony. To date, no explanation for this detail has been given.
  • Spider-Man: No Way Home has a couple major inconsistencies regarding character knowledge:
    • Dr. Strange says that the malfunctioning spell is pulling people who know that Peter Parker is Spider-Man from other universes into the prime MCU universe. However, Max Dillion never learned Spider-Man's identity in his own movie. Eddie Brock has never met Spider-Man or Peter Parker, and it's not clear if one even exists in his native universe.
    • Both Otto Octavius and Flint Marko immediately recognize Norman Osborne as the Green Goblin, even though the only people to ever learn his identity in the original films were Peter Parker, Harry Osborne, and the Osborne butler. Marko might could be hand waved by saying that sometime offscreen after the events of the third film the Goblin's identity became public knowledge, but there's no way Octavius could have known, since he died years before that could have happened.
• At the end of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer we learn that The Silver Surfer has the power to destroy Galactus, and uses it on him. This creates the following problems:
  • Why would Galactus give him that power in the first place? Particularly as he is forcing the Surfer to work for him under duress.
  • Why didn't the Silver Surfer do this millions of years ago? It does require a Heroic Sacrifice, or so he thinks. We find out in The Stinger that he survived but just arguing that "he was too wimpy to do it until now" makes him look a million times worse, as, if that's the truth, countless planets would have survived if he hadn't been such a selfish coward.
• Ocean's Eleven: The duffel bags of hooker ads magically appear in the vault elevator. Matt Damon and George Clooney don't carry them in. The Chinese acrobat couldn't fit them into his small case (nor could they get them up to the elevator, which was stopped), and the security guys carry them out before the fake SWAT team gets there. The creators even admit in the audio commentary that there's no logical explanation for how they got there.
• Rock N Rolla: How did Johnny Quid know that Lenny was the one who made a deal with the police in court? It has never been explained. Archie and the others couldn't figure it out for years as well as Mr. One-Two and Co. having to go though lots of effort to find that info. Which they did by bribing Stella's gay husband, who was a lawyer in criminal cases, a date promise from Handsome Bob. While Johnny somehow knew that secret all along. What is twice weird is that he didn't tell anyone about Lenny. He at least could've told Archie who was suppose to be his friend.
• In Terminator Salvation, Skynet somehow knows Kyle Reese is John Connor's dad. It has no way of knowing this, unless John was somehow dumb enough to spread the information around while fully aware his sworn enemy has access to time traveling robots. You could argue that future Skynet had sent that information back in time to its past self in the hopes of killing Conner before he became anyone of note in the resistance. But this is both a Voodoo Shark and never mentioned in the film.
• In Flightplan (2005):
  • The crew finds out that Kyle Pratt's daughter supposedly died with her father. No-one on the crew thought to point out the obvious: where is the other casket? If she was just acting out of grief and delusion, there should be two caskets in the plane, not just the one carrying her dead husband. Good thing Pratt's not an idiot. There is also a rare case of Lampshade Hanging making everything worse: Kyle does ask Carson where the other casket is and he claims that he doesn't care after the trouble she's caused everyone on board. While it's later revealed that he is the villain, this still only calls attention to the fact that Captain Rich and the other flight attendants don't care either. See: Voodoo Shark. There are also quite a few others. But the most amusing one has to be when Carson is lying to the captain about Kyle being the hijacker. He tells her that she outright refuses to negotiate (as to not blow his cover) and to go ahead and have the airline wire the $50 million "she" demanded without "her knowing". Next scene shows him getting a call from the captain saying it's been wired. Yeah, that's very much how real life does not work. The airline has no idea who she is and Carson gives no evidence whatsoever that's she's a hijacker. Yeah, we'll all believe she's a hijacker because an air marshal, the person one should trust the most on an airplane, says so. At the very least, the airline would want a background identity to consider wiring the money.
  • For "The Twist" to work, someone would have had to pick up the daughter and carry her to the hiding place. How did no one notice him doing this? For that matter, nobody in nearby seats, except for another child right at the end of the film, ever mentioned seeing the child.
  • The conspiracy would only work if Kyle got on that specific flight, with Carson as the sky marshal assigned to that flight. Yet she just books tickets on the next available flight. (Just as an aside, the FBI would not be present when the plane lands at Goose Bay, Newfoundland; the RCMP would.)
• The Butterfly Effect has one particularly infamous one, Time-traveling inconsistencies throughout the story aside... When Evan is trying to convince someone he is altering the past, he uses a trip back in time to give himself injuries sure to leave scars. Every other time Evan time travels, the minor changes he makes have major impacts on his and everyone else's lives long term (hence the name of the film), and his entire life is done-over after the change. However in this one instance, the intentional injury he causes himself has no impact on anything else, ending up with him in the exact same place, surrounded by the exact same people, and the scars suddenly begin to appear in the modern day as the person he is trying to convince watches, rather than having been there all along as they should have been, even if the injury somehow managed not to change a single element of his life..
• In Army of Darkness has a few, given the loose and silly nature of the film.
  • Ash chains Bad Ash to a table in the windmill he's squatting in before hacking him to pieces with his chainsaw. The problem with this is that during the scene where Ash arrived at the windmill his horse, which may have been carrying the chainsaw, was scared off into the woods by the evil entity chasing him. Ash was left to run to the windmill on foot, where he was clearly not carrying the chainsaw.
  • When Ash escapes from The Pit, as spiked walls close on it. Several minutes later, the monster from the pit climbs out, despite the walls still being closed, and Ash shoots it with his shotgun that he didn't have a few seconds earlier, causing it to fall back into the pit and land in the water below. (Though in the Director's Cut, a villager was explicitly shown giving Ash the shotgun back.)
• A big plot hole occurs at the end of Alone in the Dark (2005). The Xenos (the monsters that Carnby has been fighting for half of the movie) are supposed to be weak against light, but he and Cedrac are attacked by them in broad daylight after they emerge from underground.
• Even ignoring the massive amounts of Fridge Logic in the franchise The Purge has a rather localized, but significant plot hole in regards to the antagonists knowing that Dwayne "Bloody Stranger" Bishop ran into the Sandin's house. During the opening credits, the drive into the Sandin's neighborhood is seen, and it appears to be a somewhat gated suburb a ways away from the main city, with a long, curving road leading to their house. Later in the film, Bishop runs into the neighborhood, and takes shelter in the Sandin house. Several minutes pass before and the gang of purgers are seen entering the suburb through the gates, yet they somehow know positively which house their victim is in.
• In Zack Snyder's Justice League, it is established that Darkseid is the one who brought the three Mother Boxes to Earth in his first attempt to conquer it, and that Earth successfully repelled his invasion, being the only world to ever do so. Later on we learn that Earth hides the Anti-Life Equation, something Darkseid has desired since his first attempt to invade Earth, and that his first invasion was an attempt to acquire it. What the film doesn't even attempt to explain is how Darkseid somehow forgot where this world was. Steppenwolf, Dasaad and Darkseid are all surprised to learn that Earth was the world that resisted. Steppenwolf recognizes Atlanteans and Amazons, and also seems to be aware of the Old Gods Ares and Zeus, which makes sense because Apokolips fought against them on Earth previously, but somehow he does not recognize the planet itself? This could maybe be explained by Darkseid (either intentionally or unintentionally) not recording where he was defeated out of embarrassment...except for the simple fact that this world already has three Mother Boxes on it, and as previously explained, the only way those get onto a planet is Darkseid bringing them there. So the second Steppenwolf saw that there were Boxes on Earth, he should have realized where he was, because no other planet ever repelled Darkseid's invasion. No matter how you shake it, this detail does not make sense.
• Die Hard 2 seems to be made of plot holes and Fridge Logic:
  • The whole plot begins with the US government transporting a high-value prisoner to a civilian airport instead of the nearby military airfield.
  • The terrorists hold the planes hostage in the air by shutting down the lights at Dulles Airport. Given the amount of time and fuel the planes are depicted as having, they could have easily made it to dozens of other civilian or military airports. Any of the three other airports in the DC area could have warned the airborne planes with their own non-crippled radio system and then the terrorist threat evaporates.
  • Colonel Stuart's men also have control over all tower operations and radio communications and some instrument readings in what may be a case of Hollywood Hacking. That's how they pancake the plane as proof of their threat. A piece of fridge logic does set in when the other planes don't land after the first crash. Debris on the field?
  • The snowmobile shootout: the "terrorists" fire on Stuart's men with blanks and switch to live ammo to shoot at McClane. That is impossible, as blank rounds can't generate enough gas pressure to cycle the action of an autoloader (which they were clearly using) without an adapter. Firing live ammo in a blank-adapted gun will destroy it.
• In Mind Hunters, after repeatedly remarking that the simulation "doesn't feel real" without his gun, Vince pulls out and dramatically cocks a gun and he'd concealed in his wheelchair. All the other characters berate him for this, as they'd been specifically told not to bring weapons. However, just minutes earlier, Nic and LL Cool J's character can clearly be seen bearing handguns as they carry JD's corpse.
• The S Club 7 movie has a ton of them.
  • First of all the band see supposedly live footage of themselves performing in Los Angeles (meant to be their clones). Except the footage being shown is from their Carnival Tour when Paul was still in the band, so none of them comments on why there is a seventh band member onstage or why Jo, Jon and Hannah have extremely different hairstyles from their clone counterparts when they seem them later. And the exact same performance is shown again at the end of the movie, still meant to be a live show.
  • Second of all the trio that kidnap the clones - Jo, Bradley and Tina - are the ones that find out who Victor Gaughan is and that they were cloned. When the real Jon, Hannah and Rachel get kidnapped Jon says "Gaughan is going to clone us again" when he shouldn't have any idea who Gaughan is or that they've even been cloned in the first place. Later when the whole band meet Gaughan Rachel asks "are you the man who bought the knickers off the internet?" when again, she shouldn't know that. Though if you wanted to, you could suggest that the other three explained to them in the couple of minutes they left the cell to when they were captured again.
  • To get the clones to revolt, the Bradley clone gives a passionate speech about how great the outside world is...when his only experience of it was the week or so he'd been on tour and kept in careful isolation. While it is shown that the clones get programmed to love what the real band members love, it's unlikely Alistair would give them programming to make them want to rebel. He also mentions boomerangs but the Rachel and Hannah clones had no idea what a boomerang was until they were kidnapped so why should Bradley know? Now if the Rachel, Hannah or Jon clones had given the speech then that would make sense.
  • When the band kidnaps three of the clones, they do so while shooting a music video and we see the real Hannah and Jon having to improvise the dance routine since they haven't learned it yet. However we see Rachel following it perfectly when she shouldn't know it at all.
  • Rachel switches with her clone by sitting down in front of a piece of glass, pretending it's a mirror and then copying what the clone does. How the hell did she pull that off? The clones are a bit dim but you'd think they know how a mirror works.
  • Jo's clone does not appear in the shower scenes (in real life she had a back injury which required for her role to be less physical) but the other clones don't mention where she is, especially since they say Jon must be reported to Alistair for not showering with them.
  • The band's travel manager Natalie arrives at the end of the film with the police at Eagle Peak. First of all, she was in Spain so how did she get to LA so quickly, or know to get the police? How does she know the band are at Eagle Peak? For her to get there in the space of time the band knew about Eagle Peak she must have teleported from Spain.
• Sleeping with the Enemy:
  • Laura's entire escape plan. Safely swimming to shore in conditions that would have drowned Michael Phelps - dark, bad weather, far from shore. And where she did she get the money for her escape, her mother's stay at the nursing home, and renting and maintaining the large house she rents? No part-time library job is going to pay for that (Hollywood magic money, dontcha know? Also known as the "dream hobby job").
  • The thing with the ring. Why be so incredibly stupid that you can't figure out that maybe the ring won't flush? Why be so completely irrational after planning something for so long? And why didn't she check to see if it had washed away? Or heck, if she went far enough that he wouldn't likely see it in a consignment shop or something, why not hock the thing for extra cash?
  • Come to think of it, why didn't she tell her swimming partners or teacher that she was planning to run away from her psychotic husband? She could have called them and said, "Hey do not tell my badass crazy hubby I took swimming lessons, m'kay?"
    • This one does have some basis in reality. She was the victim of long-term physical and psychological abuse, and probably believed her husband would kill her and/or her family if she told anyone. Her swim partners would be obligated to call the police, and see the previous sentence for the result if she told. Hence the reason most women don't report abuse.
• In The Blob (1988), the titular monster can only be harmed by cold. A vehicle that shows up a few times through the film, a snow-maker, is eventually and quite logically the protagonists' best weapon. However, the vehicle also has a snow plow on the front. It projects new snow out in front of it, and then... plows through the snow. Trey Stokes, moderately known for the podcast Down In Front and puppeteer for the creature in the 1988 remake, admitted that the snow-maker exists in this snake-eating-its-own-tail manner specifically because the protagonists will need it later.
• In Fantastic Voyage there's a major plot hole in that the submarine (or the individual molecules which make up the submarine) do not grow back to their original size and gruesomely kill the patient at the end. Neither does the crew member who was killed and left behind. When writing the book, Asimov managed to fix these and some of the other holes. This particular plot hole is parodied in a Simpsons episode takeoff where the family has to save Mr. Burns At the end, Homer is left behind and does grow back to size living inside Mr. Burns's skin at his full size.
• Resident Evil: Afterlife: Alice somehow manages to land her plane on the roof of the prison in downtown Los Angeles, but we see beforehand that it is almost completely out of fuel. She barely even makes it to the roof, and then crash lands on it. Despite seeing this, the characters immediately start demanding that she fly them out of there, and one of them later steals the plane. Where did the fuel come from?
• In Resident Evil: Extinction: The opening narration claims that the T-Virus is destroying the world's water supply, complete with the Universal logo showing the oceans drying up. This plot point doesn't even last the length of the movie where it was introduced, the end shows Tokyo in the midst of a torrential rainstorm, and subsequent films in the series heavily involve a mysterious freighter on the Pacific Ocean.
• Spider-Man Trilogy:
  • In Spider-Man 2, Harry tells Doc Ock that in order to find Spider-Man he must find Peter first. Doc Ock somehow finds Peter with Mary Jane in a random cafe and throws a car through the window straight at them. Both would've been killed instantly, had Peter's spider sense not been triggered. But Doc Ock at this point has no idea that Peter actually is Spider-Man. Given that Peter is his only lead on Spider-Man, it makes no sense that Doc Ock would effectively try to kill him. Of course, Octavius has retained very little of his original sanity as a result of his tentacles taking control of his mind, so that's some explanation. Near the film's climax, Peter asks Harry to tell him the location of Doc Ock's hideout so he can save MJ and the city. Harry's reply is not shown, but Peter does manage to find his way there. If this was because Harry had told him where it was, how did Harry know? Doc Ock never told him, and it wouldn't have made any sense for him to do so. Nor is there any indication that Harry had been keeping tabs on Ock. And if Peter was able to find his way there somehow anyway, why did he even ask Harry?
  • Spider-Man 3 has a huge gap of logic. Namely, how in the hell does Eddie Brock/Venom know anything at all about Sandman? Much less about how Spider-Man won't let him help his sick daughter? Readers of the comic may know the symbiote bestows information about Peter to Eddie, giving a reasonable explanation about how he knows about Sandman, though not the daughter. However, this is not outright stated in the film so newcomers may still be in the dark.
• Star Trek:
  • In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Khan immediately recognizes Chekov, even though the ensign wasn't yet a part of the crew when Khan tried to take over the ship in the original series. A common fan theory is that Chekov was part of the crew, but not on the bridge. Walter Koenig joked that he believes Chekov accidentally made Khan wait an uncomfortable amount of time to use the bathroom.
  • In Star Trek Into Darkness, Kirk is put in a cryotube to preserve his brain function while they desperately try to recover Khan so his blood can cure Kirk. Plot hole: they first had to remove one of Khan's people from the cryotube. Why not use that person's blood?
    • The novelization ended up explaining this — McCoy was not going to risk waking up that guy and go "Oh, hey, does your blood heal all wounds, too?" and therby potentially having two superhuman psychopaths running around.
  • In Star Trek: Generations after being given an emotion chip, Data says he now gets a joke Geordi told him off screen during their very first mission together. We never hear the whole joke, but it apparently involved a Ferengi in a gorilla suit. This is strange, since the Federation didn't really know anything about the Ferengi until some time after that mission. They had met them at least twice before, but never learned who they were in those encounters.
• The film series of Harry Potter did its best, with many of the earlier holes due to later books not being released, and to their credit the writers did attempt to mop errors up as best as they could. But there are some that have no real justification.
  • In Prisoner of Azkaban, Lupin berates Harry for being so careless as to wander the corridors at night with a map that could lead a murderer right to him. But it's never explained to either Harry or the audience a) how Lupin knows that the blank piece of parchment is a map, b) how Sirius Black would know that it was a map, c) why Harry having the map makes it any more dangerous, as Sirius would have to get to him in order to get the map, or d) why Lupin keeping the map makes it safer, as surely it would be an advantage if Harry saw that Sirius was anywhere in the castle grounds - he could just run in the opposite direction. In the film, it's also never revealed that the map's authors, "Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs," were Lupin, Peter Pettigrew, Sirius, and James Potter. That would at least have cleared up a couple of these inconsistencies.
  • The lack of explanation about the Marauders bleeds over into all the successive films, as in Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix Harry refers to Sirius as Padfoot for no apparent reason. The significance of his patronus being a stag and Lily and Snape's being a doe is left unexplained, which also causes Harry's insistence that it was James who saved him and Sirius from the dementors in PoA to look incredibly stupid.
  • There is no mention of Crouch Jr. getting the Dementor's kiss. The movie states he will be sent to Azkaban, but in later movies, Voldemort frees all the Death Eaters, but Crouch Jr. never appears alongside them despite playing a major part in Voldemort's return. He likely should be Co-Dragons with Bellatrix Lestrange.
  • Sirius never gives Harry the two-way mirrors, so in Deathly Hallows the mirror shard appears out of nowhere with no explanation. (Actually he gives him a wrapped package in the fifth book and says "don't open it here.") Sure, this is mentioned later, when Aberforth explains that Mundungus stole it and sold it, but anyone who hadn't read the books would probably be hard pressed to remember who that was. Also, what sort of peddler decides that a broken mirror will fetch a good price? Did he know it was magical? What's the point of a two-way mirror that can only be used when smashed? Why did Harry pick up a random piece of mirror from the Black house? Why does he obsess over it before he sees Aberforth?
  • At the beginning of Deathly Hallows Part 1, Tonks tells Harry that she and Lupin are married, then says "Everyone, Remus and I"- while touching her stomach, before being interrupted by Moody. Fans of the books will realize she was about to say she's pregnant, but this subject is not broached again until the end of part two when Harry sees Ghost!Lupin right before he is about to die and says "I'm sorry you never got to know your son." Harry has absolutely no frigging way of knowing Lupin had a kid at all, and even if he (uncharacteristically) extrapolated from that interrupted sentence he couldn't have known it was a boy. This is a particularly frustrating one, as it would have made a hell of a lot more sense if the scriptwriters had allowed Tonks to finish that sentence.
• Nine Dead: The mysterious captor kidnaps nine people who were responsible for the death of his son in some way and proceeds to kill them one by one until they figure out what it is they did. However, this plan requires that he possesses far more information than is plausible. Having presumably witnessed his son's trial for armed robbery and the insurance company's investigation when his son was dying of AIDS after serving out his term, he should at least know the identities of Kelly (the public prosecutor), Chan (the chief witness in the trial), Eddie (the insurance investigator), and maybe Jackson (assuming that he was the investigating officer). He could have found out the identity and whereabouts of Coogan (who raped the captor's son during his stint in prison) based on information his son could have provided him. However, he never knew anything about Sully loaning money to Christian, Leon selling the gun to Christian that was used in the robbery, Christian confessing to Father Francis that he was the real robber, or Kelly deceiving Jackson so she could forge the evidence, nor could he have known without being omniscient. This is poorly handwaved by the captor explaining his scheme took two years of planning.
• Jaws: The Revenge has a ton of them but the biggest one of all lies right in its premise: the shark from Jaws wants revenge against its killer, the now-deceased Chief Brody, and starts off by killing Brody's son. The non-sapient animal that was blown to bits in the first movie? It's back and it wants vengeance. Also, how does it know that the Brody family is going to the Bahamas and how is it able to beat the jet there? The best explanation you're gonna get for any of that is from the novelization and the Hand Wave it attempted is the Trope Namer for the Voodoo Shark.
• In The Princess Bride, when Count Rugen first uses the machine on Westley, he moves the switch to "1", and we see a block of wood raise about an inch, and water trickle under it. If the block had been raised up all the way, the water would continue to trickle at the same rate, so setting it to 50, as the prince does later, would be no different. Though maybe the flow of water just turns the machine on and off and the "throttle" is controlled by some other unseen mechanism.
• Freddy vs. Jason: The protagonists somehow manage to leave Springwood in a van with a drugged-up Jason Voorhees in the back despite the fact that Sheriff Williams had set up 24 hour roadblocks.
• Aliens All kinds of holes regarding tracking.
  • Hicks gives Ripley a tracking bracelet, and we then see her later turn around and give it to Newt to comfort her. But then when Newt falls down the shaft, Hicks reminds Ripley that they can track Newt because she has the bracelet, even though she never told him she had given Newt the bracelet. The first time she sees Hicks after this handoff is after the team rescues them from the Facehuggers and the base is soon overrun by the alien assault. Not only do we not see this exchange of information on screen, it doesn't exactly scream that it's a priority to discuss considering they're under attack.
  • When the duo do find Newt underneath the floor grates and attempt to free her, Ripley can see the approaching alien horde on the motion tracking device as a massive blob of dots approaching. However, the device completely fails to see the singular alien approaching Newt from behind as if it just came out of nowhere.
  • Slightly before either of these events, the group has sealed off the door to the complex and is grimly preparing for the wave of aliens coming their way. It is when Hudson reads that the aliens are only 6 meters away that the group realizes that they're close enough to be inside the room, and Hudson keeps counting down and gets to 4, with the implication that the aliens are moving about 1 meter per second. However, even though they are allegedly less than 4 meters away, the group has time to have a brief argument, a knowing look at the ceiling, a pause for Hicks to find something to stand on, and then a very slow pan of Hicks lifting up the ceiling tile and getting a chance to see the aliens in the ceiling section. Apparently, once the humans had realized something was up, the aliens stopped their approaching assault to give them a sporting chance to figure out what was happening. Either that, or Talking Is a Free Action.
• Alien³. All the aliens were destroyed in the previous film, and the queen tore off her ovipositor when she went after Ripley. In this film however there is somehow an alien egg on board the Sulaco. Actually two of them. Popular fan theories are that the queen keeps an extra egg stored in some other part of her body for emergencies.
• Hudson Hawk jumps off of a hi-rise building and lands in a recliner in his corrupt parole officer's living room. Either a scene was cut from the movie, or Eddie fell through a plot hole to make the scene change. His fellow jumper appears in the following scene, no worse for wear and with no explanation as to how they survived a fall of several stories without injury.
• Draft Day hinges on the Cleveland Browns trading three first round draft picks to Seattle to move up from the #7 overall pick to the #1 overall pick. Cleveland then later trades three second round draft picks to acquire the #6 pick from Jacksonville. Then Seattle trades the same three first rounders back to Cleveland to move up from #7 to #6. For those keeping score, that means Seattle inexplicably traded back from #1 to #6 for nothing at all.
• In My Cousin Vinny, a subplot involves Vinny lying to the presiding judge about his background as a lawyer. This culminates with Vinny giving the Judge the false name "Jerry Callo" as the name under which he legally practiced law. However, the judge tells him he is requesting information on his alias, and will have it by the end of the trial. The next time this is brought up, it revealed that Vinny's fiancée had asked a friend in New York to fax the judge false information about the fictitious Callo's legal career. But Vinny had never told her that was the name he'd given the judge. Furthermore, if it had been easy enough to send the judge fake information about Callo, then it would have been just as easy to send fake information about Vinny in the first place.
  • Possible explanation: it is Vinny's fiancée who points out that the first name Vinny used, "Jerry Gallow", won't hold up under scrutiny, so it's not unlikely she and Vinny thought up "Callo" together. And the fake information only became a factor after the judge had already checked up on Vinny.
• Split Second (1992): It is likely that the identity of the Serial Killer as being a giant Xenomorph-like monster was decided on fairly late in production, because a lot of the movie becomes nonsensical as a result. The alien is a nine-foot tall behemoth, yet no one in the night club (Or any of the other murder scenes) notice it walking around, while there's also a Murderer P.O.V. shot shown at human eye level. It has giant claws, yet it can smear big letters on a mirror in blood. It can't talk, but somehow it paid someone to deliver a victim's heart to the police station. And so on.
  
  There seems to an attempt at Lampshade Hanging when the creature's DNA report comes back - it has the DNA of all its victims and even rat DNA, which Detective Dick Durkin mentions as being 'Multiple Restriction Polymorphic DNA strands'. This might indicate that the creature is supposed to be a Shapeshifter of some sort and that it only changes back to its natural form when about to kill. Of course, this still doesn't explain anything else in the film, like why it kills based on the lunar cycle; why it behaves like a human serial killer; its obsession with Harley Stone and the psychic connection between them; what the creature is or where it came from; why it stopped killing prior to the film; why it bothers to steal a shotgun from the back of Stone's police 4x4 and use it on Stone and Durkin when it is, as established, a nine-foot tall walking nightmare of claws and teeth; why it doesn't bother to fight back when Stone rips its heart out and finally kills it, and a myriad of other gaping holes in the plot.
• Lethal Weapon:
  • When Riggs and Murtaugh head to the desert to free Murtaugh's kidnapped daughter, Riggs is dropped off with a sniper rifle and takes up position on a ridge several hundred yards away, overlooking the events. At this point, the Big Bad and his cronies believe Riggs is dead. Yet within a few seconds of Riggs opening fire on the antagonists, the Big Bad has ascertained Riggs' exact location and managed to sneak up behind him and put a gun to his head.
  • Near the end of the film, Riggs is chasing down The Dragon, Mr. Joshua on foot, Joshua commandeers a car and escapes, Riggs has to then run all the way back to Hollywood Boulevard to find Murtaugh, who realises that Joshua will seek revenge against his family. Bearing in mind that Joshua has a massive head-start and knows exactly where he is going, the heroes still get to Murtaugh's house so far ahead of Joshua that they have time to evacuate everyone and set up an overly-elaborate trap which involves destroying the front of Murtaugh's house with an unmanned squad car. How did they get there so much quicker than him and why didn't they just have the plethora of uniformed cops they have with them draw down on Joshua and arrest him as soon as he rolled up? (Glaringly, their Rule of Cool approach to his capture costs two uniformed officers their lives when Joshua guns them down on arrival at the house.)
• In Sudden Death, the bad guys hold the vice president for ransom during the 7th game of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. It is never explained how/why they could plan this caper with only a few days warning. The necessity of a game seven cannot be known until the outcome of game six is determined, assuming that a series reaches the sixth contest. In other words, game seven is the only one in a best-of-seven series that cannot be guaranteed more than one game in advance.
• In Over the Top, the climactic Las Vegas arm wrestling tournament is a double-elimination tournament, yet when protagonist (and losers' finalist) Lincoln Hawk defeats his arch-rival (and winners' finalist) Bull Hurley in the championship match, he is immediately declared the champion. When the losers' finalist wins the championship match of a double-elimination tourney, there is supposed to be a rematch between the two finalists. Lincoln Hawk, being both physically injured and emotionally exhausted, would probably have lost if the tournament officials hadn't forgotten about the rematch.
• Dracula (1931) goes through much of the book's plot, including Lucy's death and her return as the vampiric "Bloofer Lady". But after the Bloofer Lady is mentioned, the film forgets about her. Particularly notable is that the Spanish-language version, shot at the same time on the same sets (literally filming immediately after the English-language version wrapped for the day) with largely the same script, does resolve this point!
• In The Santa Clause 3, the main plot is that Jack Frost is trying to steal Santa's powers and does get them at one point. At the end of the movie, however, Mother Nature explicitly states that their powers don't work on each other. The second movie had Cupid declare this as well. So... how can Jack Frost steal Santa's powers if their powers don't work on each other?
• In Hello Mary-Lou: Prom Night II The song "Hello Mary Lou" by Ricky Nelson (which the writers presumably named the character after) is sort of a trademark favorite song for the titular villain and comes on the radio and the like whenever she's in the vicinity. The problem is the song came out in 1961, while in the movie she dies in 1957. You could say she heard the song and started liking it after she died, however the movie implies her spirit has been lying dormant for decades and is "awakened" when the protagonist opens an old trunk holding her clothes and tiara, not to mention that "she still listens to the radio as a ghost" is a pretty weird explanation to start with.
• Batman & Robin creates a huge plot hole with Batman's first line: basically, Robin is complaining and Batman does an Aside Glance and says "This is why Superman works alone" as a joke. The problem is: this implies Superman (and, presumably, all the DCU superheroes) exist in the films' universe. Which raises tons of questions such as: why do we never see them or even hear anyone else talk about them? Why do they never come help out Batman when Gotham's in grave danger? And why are the people in the first movie so skeptical about Batman existing if superheroes both exist and are apparently common knowledge? Really, the only way around this is to just claim that the joke was only for the viewers and doesn't exist in the context of the movie's universe.
• In See No Evil 2, there is absolutely no explanation given as to how Jacob Goodnight managed to survive the original film. For one, although nigh-indestructible murderers are common in slashers, Jacob was very clearly portrayed in the first movie as a normal human being who just happened to be of hulking size - though he did live after getting shot in the head, there actually is a slim chance for a regular person to survive such an injury. Second, the end of the film practically goes out of its way to assure the audience that he died, as he's not only stabbed in the eye, but he falls several stories and his heart is outright shown to have been punctured, which is completely guaranteed to kill anyone. One could say that a sequel was not anticipated at the time, but with the long gap between releases, it would've been easy to retcon Jacob as some sort of undead creature. Yet, the only line in the sequel alluding to his survival was that he "somehow faked his death", even though the original film blatantly showed this to not be the case, and given that it takes place right after the first, this makes even less sense.
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day has a rather well-known one. In the first film, it's stated that only organisms with living tissue can travel through time, hence why the T-800 has to have a human skin covering. This film, however, shows the T-1000 traveling through time even though it's made entirely of liquid metal. Some people have argued that it might be able to imitate living tissue, but this is never stated in the film. However, the novelisation and the T2 Extreme Edition release's commentary does state that the T-1000 simply had a synthetic flesh covering, encased by Skynet's advanced technology, which is then sloughed off.
• American Psycho 2: All American Girl:
  • In the flashback at the start Rachel's narration says there was nothing connecting her to the murder scene, even though a cleaning lady witnessed her leaving the room. Or that the victim was her babysitter and babysitting her at the time.
  • The intro has Patrick Bateman performing a murder that is completely unlike any of the crimes from his own story.
  • Somehow, Rachel's parents don't find out she died under another name (Rachel Newman) despite her faking her death with that one, so Eric doesn't know.
  • Rachel managing to get into the FBI is deeply implausible, as they do thorough background checks and psychiatric examinations which would reveal a sociopath with a fake identity.
• In Ocean's 8, Debbie and insurance investigator John Frazier agree that she has an alibi for the jewel theft: She was supposedly on camera the whole time. Except, the movie takes great pains to show us the camera angle and where the blind spot is located and that is not true - When Daphne enters the bathroom, Debbie jumps in front of her security team (i.e. into the blindspot) to stop them from following her in. Further, Debbie not only hindering the security team but using her false identity by speaking German proves that she was an accomplice. Even if Frazier is willing to let her off the hook in exchange for a fraction of the jewels, the NYPD has no reason to accept the same deal. And Debbie (at minimum) is violating her parole by defrauding VOGUE to get into the Met Gala.
• In Carrie (1976), Sue just suddenly gets up and sneaks into the prom for reasons that aren't explained. Some viewers mistakenly thought she was in on the prank, as this plot point doesn't make much sense otherwise. Did she just go to make sure Carrie and Tommy are ok? If so, why did she just happen to show up right before the blood is poured? The 2013 remake fixes this by having her get a threatening text from Chris which motivates her to sneak in.
• The Postman: The main character was in his childhood "when the last of the great cities died" plus at the end he was revealed to be born ca. 1973. This would imply that the war took place in the late 70's or early 80's, and fits with a scenario where the Cold War went hot, to cause World War III. However, the film Universal Soldier is owned by the Holnists, which came out in 1992, when he would have been 18 or 19, hardly a child. Of course, it's Hope who's the Postman's daughter relating this, and she probably just had been told the story by him, so it could well have been garbled (he could have said he'd been "just a kid" at the time for instance, which she took literally).
• In Batman Returns Oswald Cobblepot aka Penguin was abandoned by his parents as a baby because of his deformed appearance and behavior, they dumped him in his basket off a bridge where he was adopted by penguins in an abandoned zoo, it is not explained how he learned to speak or became associated with the Red Circus Gang, and surely people would’ve come to collect the penguins at some point and transfer them to another zoo.

Live-Action TV

• The Boys (2019):
  • If Homelander is fast enough to save Butcher from his bomb at the end of season 1, then that begs the question of why Homelander didn't use his superspeed to catch The Boys while hunting for them in the sewers.
  • Also when in the sewer, Homelander somehow doesn't hear Hughie mention to Starlight that he messaged her despite the fact that it has been well established that Homelander has super-hearing and he was only a few feet away.
  • When Homelander accidently kills an innocent bystander while fighting a super terrorist and it is caught on video, there is a massive public outcry and protest of him. How does he fix it? He gets Stormfront to make a bunch of memes. Granted, Victoria Neuman is still fighting against Vought (or maybe not), and the memes didn't win over everyone, but the protests stop and Homelander is able to go about his business (even continue filming a movie), despite being filmed killing a civilian. In fact, the video never really comes up again.
  • When Maeve asks The Deep to find the black box from Flight 37 to blackmail Homelander with, he fails to find it and instead brings her a Go Pro Camera a school of Halibut found. It's difficult to believe that not only did the Go Pro survived months of floating around in the ocean, but that it was found when the black box is still unaccounted for ^note For those who don't know, a black box is two devices that record flight data and the last 2 hours of nosie in the cockpit. They also are in cased in titanium and emit a locator beacon in case of submersion. Given that they spoke in the cockpit, it would prove that Homelander and Maeve were on the plane when they said they weren't.
  • Butcher and Hughie are able to come into a hospital, get medical treatment for Hughie, and leave without anyone notifying the police despite both of them being wanted criminals.
  • After Lamplighter burns himself alive, somehow enough of the skin on one of his hands survives that Hughie is still able to use his fingerprints.
  • For some reason, emergency lights blare in the Vought cells during a crisis, allowing Starlight to use the light to blast down the door to her cell.
  • When A-Train goes to give Hughie and Starlight proof that Stormfront is a literal nazi, he apparently ran around the borrows until he found them. When they rightfully ask how he was able to do that with his heart condition, he brushes it off by saying his heart is fine. As a reminder, only a few episodes ago, he wasn't able to push himself for more than a few minutes before slumping over in pain.
    • Also, during the same conversation, the three of them are able to talk in the middle of the sidewalk without anyone recognizing them despite two of them being wanted criminals and one of them being a famous superhero in his full costume.
  • When The Boys, Starlight, and Kimiko are struggling to fight Stormfront, Queen Maeve shows up almost completely out of nowhere for a Big Damn Heroes moment, despite having no means to get there that fast and undetected.
  • Despite the latter being immune to bullets, Becca is able to stab Stormfront through her eye with a pocketknife. Almost to underscore the point, Stormfront doesn't even feel Butcher hitting her with a crowbar seconds later. Even assuming the intention is that her skin is super-strong and not her eyes, it doesn't explain how there is a slit on Stormfront's eyelid. It is possible though that her skin, rather than being super-hard, is equivalent to an aramid fiber like Kevlar which can resist low-velocity gunfire quite well but is susceptible to someone stabbing through the weave with a knife.
• Power Rangers Operation Overdrive: The explanation given for civilians powers this season is that the rangers DNA was altered. This causes problems when it is revealed that Mack is an android.
• Power Rangers Megaforce: Way too many individual ones to list here, but they're all caused by one of several things, or possibly all at once. Reasons being, the adaptation of the 2 different Sentai series, Tensou Sentai Goseiger and Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger weren't allowed to be adapted as their own separate shows in Power Rangers, the writers didn't keep track of their own continuity, or the continuity between the adapted shows shows, leading to terms being used in Power Rangers that were from the Sentai seasons, but not Power Rangers, things just happen with no prior build-up or explanation and the characters react to them as if they make complete sense or aren't shocking, past Rangers have their powers again if they were destroyed at the end of their respective seasons with no explanation (the Sentai seasons generally let their characters keep their powers), details of previous seasons are never brought up in regards to world-ending events (Gosei is just woken up at the start of this incarnation despite it being 14 years since Zordon died and there were just as many new super villains, as well as Gosei's existence never being elaborated on and says the world had never seen a threat like the Armada before, despite the fact that it did several times), the Rangers flip-flopping at times early on as if they're not on an world where the Power Rangers were a thing, Jake randomly switching from Black to Green for his suit color (only a meta joke is begun but interrupted when he brings it up and it's never brought up again. The main 5 Rangers all have both suits from each season in the second and he's the only one to switch colors in between while previous seasons that had the teams go from on Sentai to the next generally get rid of the previous powers for the characters to get new ones, minus Zeo for some reason, but there was a lot going on behind the scenes at the time), the Ranger Keys not being given a proper origin explanation despite the Morphin Grid existing, which would've been perfect, why their motif shifts from mystical animals to pirates, the editors and producers leaving in Sentai-only Ranger suits in the stock footage with little more than an initial handwave to explain them (in fact, they actually made new versions of 4 of the suits in one of the last few episodes because they couldn't be bothered to replace more than 1 of them for a fight) with the Rangers acting like they make perfect sense to be there and knowing their powers, and/or the writers being lazy or just being told to translate the Sentai episodes almost word-for-word, which have the characters either act out of character (more like their Sentai counterparts) or have inconsistent characterizations as a result of the writers not caring or having enough time to script the episodes properly. Orion probably has it the worst of the main cast, though, since he gets his Morpher and Ranger Key essentially out of thin air when he was mining on his home planet one day and there's no explanation for that, then the fact that he can pilot an Armada ship, then the fact that he can fight with other Ranger powers with no explanation or training given or shown, and he has a complete personality shift the next episode after his introduction with no explanation.
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch: In Dante's Inferno Hilda is suffering from Punitis which causes the words she says to become reality. Meanwhile Zelda has a date with a man named Ron, but when he arrives Hilda makes the mistake of describing him as a "real dear" which instantly turns him into a literal deer. Zelda decides to make the most of it and takes the deer on a date. But Zelda is a witch, so why doesn't she just turn Ron back into a man and carry on with the date as if nothing happened?
• Stargate SG-1:
  • In "48 Hours", had the SGC go through a variety of political wrangling with the Russians so they could borrow the DHD they'd used in their own abortive stargate program. The writers apparently forgot that the Americans already had the DHD found with the Beta Gate in Antarctica. The next season's episode "Frozen" patched the hole by explaining offhand that the Beta DHD ran out of power a few days after they got it back from the NID.
• Stargate Atlantis: In several episodes (all five seasons, actually), a recurrent plot hole is the inability to use systems on Atlantis because of the lack of sufficient power because of the lack of ZPMs. This makes little sense as 1. There are no backup power systems on Atlantis at all? and 2. Where are the facilities on Atlantis to make new ones? As fast as even new ZPMs were depleted in use, there would have had to be a way to make them with relative ease, and 3. Given their access to the Ancient's database, after discovering that Atlantis had no primary, secondary, tertiary, or quaternary power backups at all, unlike modern spacecraft that have multiple redundancies in every important system, McKay and Zelenka would have looked up fusion power generator designs in the database and starting building them using the incredibly advanced fabrication facilities on Atlantis and the ready supply of hydrogen from the ocean's water. While not as compact as a ZPM, fusion could have met the power needs of the city without difficulty.
• Star Trek: The Original Series:
  • Episode "Who Mourns for Adonais?", the Enterprise encounters a Sufficiently Advanced Alien. Kirk leads a landing party down to the nearby planet, where the alien reveals that he is the Greek god Apollo. Later in the episode, Spock, who had been on the Enterprise the whole time, makes reference to Apollo. There is no way Spock could have known who the alien was as Apollo immediately jammed the landing party's communicators.
  • In a really weird example, Kirk suddenly knows at the end of " And the Children Shall Lead" that the Sufficiently Advanced Alien of the week is called "the Gorgon". This was not only never mentioned in front of Kirk, it was not mentioned previously in the episode at all.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: In the series finale, "All Good Things...", Picard finds himself shifting between a present-day, past, and future timeline. It turns out that the Q continuum is testing if he'll figure out how to stop a temporal anomaly that moves backwards through time from destroying life in the Alpha Quadrant. It turns out that Picard's actions in the future timeline created the anomaly to begin with, but when he first gets to the area it should be at in the future timeline there's no sign of it. If it in fact expands in reverse chronological sequence then it should have already been there when Picard arrived, and then disappeared at the moment he created it.
• Star Trek: Enterprise: One episode sent the ship to investigate the first human colony outside the solar system to find out why it had suddenly stopped communicating with Earth — roughly 80 years prior. Nobody had been sent to check this out earlier, because humans didn't have sufficiently fast ships. When T'Pol points out that the Vulcans had such ships eighty years ago, and could have investigated immediately, Captain Archer says only that asking favors from the Vulcans tended to carry a high price. There is no further elaboration of this point, and no examples of said high prices are given, presumably because any price high enough to justify The Federation leaving a colony full of innocents at the mercy of a cruel universe indefinitely would be out of character, even for the Vulcans of this era.
• Red Dwarf: Plays fast and loose with its own rules at the best of times, mostly because it's more concerned with being a sitcom. One notable example of many is a double-whammy: In "Backwards", how are Rimmer and Kryten able to keep in contact with Holly on Backwards Earth when the ship (and thus Holly's mainframe) is in a completely different part of space and time? And if Holly is in contact with them, why doesn't she just tell Lister and the Cat what happened to them, instead of leaving Lister and the Cat to trawl through space for three weeks before finding the time hole?
• Charmed:
  • "Chris-Crossed" brings up a ton of them. First of all Chris's hair is long in the flashbacks when it was short when he first appeared at the end of Season 5, as well as his clothes being different. Second of all, the flashback shows Chris going through a portal in the attic when he orbed into the attic in his first episode. And when he first appeared, he says he has come to stop the Titans as they rule the world in his future. Yet the flashbacks have no mention of the Titans.
  • He also mentions that Paige was killed by the Titans yet in a later episode he says he goes to her for money in the future.
  • A real Plot hole in the Chris plot is the whole Valhala thing. Why did he send Leo to Valhala in the first place? It's what caused Leo and Piper's temporary breakup which Nearly stops them from doing the dirty and conceiving him. It's like he wanted to make his mission as difficult as possible.
  • A lot of stuff in later Charmed was like this, since they were often implied that they had always been there, and the Charmed Ones really should have seen them already, prompting fan reactions of "Where the hell were they before?!" Two examples:
    • The Cleaners: Magical entities that were supposed to erase incidents and people that exposed magic to the real world. They were severely disliked because there were multiple incidents of magic being exposed that they never acted during, such as the exposure that resulted in Prue dying.
    • Magic School: This one really bugged people since it would have greatly helped the Charmed Ones when they were still learning their abilities. It's designed for children, sure, but considering they were the Chosen Ones, they could all any help they could get.
    • The Charmed Ones themselves: The series starts with Prue, Piper, and Phoebe discovering and gradually accepting that they have magical powers and a destiny. Later in the series, this aspect is entirely ignored, and the narrative treats it as if they've been kicking demon ass their whole lives. When the Elders are going to shut down the Magic School, pointing out that the Charmed ones didn't need it, Paige explains that it's because they were taught by their family and not every magical user has magical family. Except Paige is the only one who actually did learn from her family. The other girls got occasional help from the ghosts of their mother and grandmother, but the bulk of their training came from Fly Or Die demon hunting.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • The last season introduces a new form of Super-Vampire called the Turok-Han. They have the same weaknesses as regular vampires. They die by a wooden stake in the heart, or decapitation, or sunlight. But their strengths are massively amplified, to the point that the highly experienced and strong Buffy Summers is unable to drive a stake deep enough through the Turokahn's super tough and thick skin to pierce its heart. A vicious, brutal, lopsided beatdown of curbstomp proportions ensues. Later Buffy is only able to kill this one Turokhan by luring him to a battlefield of her choosing where, after a lengthy battle she finally manages to decapitate him using razor wire. So, clearly the Turok-Han are insanely tough right? This was the point. Cue the inverse law of Ninjas. In "Chosen", Buffy and her squad of newly activated rookie slayers proceed to casually and effortlessly dust Turok-Hans left and right. Upstairs, the purely human (but fairly badass by human standards) Robin Wood is also effortlessly killing every Turok-Han that comes near him with a simple metal knife to the chest. Nerdy little Andrew and clueless Anya (also both human, and considerably less combat-capable than Robin) are also effortlessly killing Turok-Hans. Anya kills one with a glancing blow from her sword to the hip. Word of God acknowledges the inconsistency, but says that the story of empowerment is more important than continuity here A fan theory is that the first Turokhan was much tougher because it had had a chance to feed unlike the Turokhan horde which was emerging from having been trapped underground for millenia.
  • In the Season 4 Episode "The Initiative", Spike gets knocked out and captured by the titular government agency. He escapes, beating up several Initiative personnel on the way out, but when he tries to kill Willow, he learns the hard way that they implanted a chip in his brain that causes him excruitating pain whenever he tries to hurt humans. But again, he beat up the human scientists earlier in the episode, after the chip was installed, without any problem. Joss Whedon also acknowledged this as an oversight.
  • Another one, again acknowledged by Joss Whedon, is the nature of Angel's curse at the hands of gypsies. Angel's soul is restored, and his conscience along with it, forcing him to live the guilt of having murdered thousands of people. Great so far, but the clause about losing his soul again if he ever experiences a moment of happiness - with potentially centuries to millennia in which to happen upon such a moment - just ensured he'd eventually resume his body count. Not only that, but their contingency plan involved two gypsies who were nowhere near in Angel's league in terms of combat. This is actually addressed in the show when it's revealed that uncover gypsy Jenny Calendar is not fully sold on the idea, to which her uncle tells her that they don't make the rules and they worship vengeance as a concept that is arbitrary and inscrutible in nature. This has its own share of problems. For one, if this form of gypsy-ism is still an active religion, it's reasonable to assume it must have ceded enough ground to contemporary attitudes that the gypsies would use their magic to give Angel a better curse or at least do anything other than wait and see if he loses his soul, then try to re-curse him before he kills too many people. To not do so would be like the Christian Church still burning "witches" at the stake in the 21st century while in reality large parts of it of it have accepted evolution. And if the religion has all but died out, so would its ability to keep tabs on an immortal being over the course of nearly a century. Holtz lampshaded the problem in Angel: "Gypsies have a knack for creative vengeance, but where they fail is in the execution of justice."
  • Yet another one is the circumstances of Buffy's sacrifice in the season 5 finale "The Gift". The gang discover that the ritual Glory must perform to open the portal requires Dawn's blood. But... Glory had no idea her Key was even human until Ben let it slip accidentally. Which begs the question: why didn't she figure it out sooner? And more importantly, why didn't the monks transform the Key into something without blood in order to avoid the whole mess entirely. (Unless there were other rituals in case the Key was in another form, but this is never mentioned.) Then there's the sacrifice itself. Dawn has Buffy's blood because they're sisters and Dawn was made from Buffy, thus allowing Buffy to close the portal and die in Dawn's place. But... while Dawn may have the same blood as Buffy, the fact remains that it's only generic, and only Dawn's blood has magic Key powers. Buffy's does not, otherwise she would have been able to open the portal too - something it was stated many times only the Key (Dawn) could do. In reality, Buffy's blood would not have been able to close the portal at all and should have done as much good as someone unrelated to Dawn attempting to sacrifice themselves. What's even more frustrating is that Buffy's death has been foreshadowed all season, so surely Joss and the writers could have come up with a better way to kill her off that would've made a lot more sense. Throw in the suicidal framing that's extremely disturbing once you see it, and becomes perhaps one of the most baffling moments on the entire show.
• A rather small one appears in 24 season 4, episode 9. Dina agrees to tell CTU all she knows if they can guarantee her son's safety. The son then tells his father, who is attempting to kill him, that if he kills him his mother will tell CTU everything because she cares about his safety. Does not compute!
• In the Mad About You episode "The Caper", several different couples go into the Buckmans' neighbor's apartment to fetch food. Each couple, when they return, comments on the neighbor's gorgeous painting. When the painting goes missing, each couple in turn is accused of having stolen it while they were fetching the food — despite the fact that the later couples reported it was still there when they saw it.
• Heroes:
  • While both Peter and Sylar were in those medical comas, there comes the issue that in season 1 the room Sylar was kept in seemed to dampen abilities (if the Haitian/Renee was there the whole time he would've stopped Eden), whereas in season 2 Peter needs to take pills to dampen abilities, and in season three there's early on the drug induced comas
  • In Volume 2, it's revealed that Adam Monroe injecting his healing blood into Peter also 'cures' his Haitian-induced memory loss. However, Peter already has that ability, and used it to heal himself after being shot in Ireland. Why didn't this restore his memory?
  • Furthermore, in Volume 1 HRG sends the Haitian to wipe Claire's memory. The Haitain does not wipe her memory, but given what we know about Adam and Adam's Healing Factor, this would have been impossible anyway. This could be explained away by saying that HRG and the Haitian didn't know this, but considering they've both spent decades working for the Company (an operation that captures and studies evolved humans) and have had Adam Monroe as a prisoner all that time, it seems unlikely that they'd never tried to erase his memory and would thus, be unaware of this information.
  • This one's a doozy: At the end of Season 2, Nathan is shot during a press conference before he can reveal his powers to the world. When Season 3 begins, we find out that Nathan is miraculously back to normal, which apparently is the result of Linderman, apparently a ghost, healing him with his Healing power. However, later on, we find out that Linderman wasn't real, and was instead a figment of Maury Parkman's imagination, projected using his Mind Control power. That's all fine and dandy, except... WHO THE HELL HEALED NATHAN? Unsurprisingly, this is never explained or even addressed.
    • It's directly addressed in episode eight of season two, Four Months Ago... A flashback reveals that Adam Monroe — who has healing powers similar to Claire — injects some of his blood into Nathan in order to heal him.
  • Another plot hole regards the age at which Claire manifested her healing powers. When Claire reunites with her birth mother, Meredith Gordon, and later, her birth father, Nathan Petrelli, it is revealed Nathan and Meredith believed their 18-month old daughter, Claire, perished in a fire. Claire's grandmother, Angela Petrelli, reveals she has protected Claire from the Company (see above) since Claire's infancy and knew she survived but allowed Claire's father to believe his daughter died in the fire. Claire assumes she survived the fire due to her Healing Factor but the problem with this assumption is that other episodes establish Claire's healing ability as manifesting when she was a teenager, not as a baby. Also, a graphic novel depicts 18-month old Claire being carried out of the burning building by one of the Company's agents, Noah Bennet, who Angela arranged to become Claire's adoptive father after the fire. Since this graphic novel was not depicted on the show, most viewers are in the dark about this detail and the age at which Claire manifested her powers remains confused.
  • In a flashback episode, when she first leaves Primatech, Meredith refers to her daughter by name, 'Claire', who she believed died in a fire at 18 months old. Even if Primatech knew that Meredith had named her 'Claire' (in reality, it's not even clear that Primatech knew Meredith was Claire's mother at all), why would they retain it? Calling Claire a different name would have made it much harder for Meredith to find her (or vice versa).
• In North and South (U.S.), a few things don't make any sense:
  • At the end of Book II, Orry Main finds his wife, Madeline, whom he hasn't seen for more than two years. When he finally finds her, he sees his baby for the first time. Madeline had been pregnant with Orry's baby when she disappeared over two years ago, but when Orry meets his baby, the baby is only about six months old. This becomes more noticeable when Charles Main, Orry's cousin, makes it back to Augusta's house for the first time in two months. When he gets there, Washington informs him that Augusta is dead, but that she had died giving birth to Charles' baby. When Charles had seen her two months prior to this, she wasn't showing the least bit of being pregnant. When Charles meets his baby, the baby looks to be two years old or older even though it couldn't have been more than two months old within the timeline.
  • The drummer boy who hangs out with Billy Hazard spends a few years with Billy's unit, but he doesn't age at all.
  • At one point, Billy Hazard leaves his unit so he can go check on Ashton. He reasons with himself that he'll be back before his unit will see combat again, then stays gone for eight months. When he returns, sure enough, his unit hasn't been called into combat in his absence.
• A very large one in Battlestar Galactica (2003): one of the largest plot twists in the series revolves around the song "All Along the Watchtower". The series finale reveals the series is set hundreds of thousands of years in our past. So how'd the song get there? It was revealed late in Season 4 that Anders was a musician in his former/original life on the first Earth and that he wrote it. Why the song is identical to one from our modern era is not explained however.
• How I Met Your Mother has some discontinuity pertaining to Robin Sparkles. First it was a one hit wonder and her only song, then she had a second song which she said tanked, then her character was based off a TV show suddenly, then not only did she have a third song, she was one of the biggest celebrities in Canada and won many awards. She even had a very public meltdown and changed her stage name to Robin Daggers, an event that apparently every Canadian alive still remembers.
• Castle: In "Veritas" how did Joana Becket put a tape of Senator Bracken admitting to HER OWN murder inside the elephants? And if she got that tape BEFORE she was murdered, why didn't she take it to the police?
• Doctor Who:
  • Due to the (unplanned) Anachronic Order, (planned) Sequel Escalation and low-quality Expanded Universe and "Dalekmania" merch, the Daleks manage to hit full Continuity Snarl by their second story, with basically anything involving them from "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" until the Dalek Continuity Reboot in "Genesis of the Daleks" making absolutely no sense at all. For just one obvious example, the programme shows Dalek technology steadily advancing (apart from the odd Character Check here and there) over the Doctor's timeline but going back and forth over the Daleks' - for instance, it's hard to imagine a race locked in centuries of stalemate against a bunch of pacifistic Noble Savages to have access to the intergalactic space travel required to invade Earth, and the Daleks' Kryptonite Factors (dependence on external power sources, an inability to survive in environments that aren't poisonously radioactive) only affect them depending on if anyone cares about it this week. All of this can maybe be Hand Waved with Timey-Wimey Ball, since the Daleks invent time travel in their third appearance.
  • A glaring example is the scene in "The Power of the Daleks" where the Doctor pulls a bunch of random items out of a drawer in his TARDIS, including a cube of Dalekanium. When he gets out onto Vulcan he discovers that it's one of two keys for a downed Dalek ship - the other one in the possession of the scientist who discovered the ship in the first place. It's quite reasonable for a ship key to be in the vicinity of a ship, but how the heck did the Doctor get hold of his key? Some fans Fan Wank that the First Doctor had found it in an unseen Dalek encounter, but there is really no place to fit it into the continuity unless you take Broad Strokes.
  • One of the aspects of the arc in Series 4 is Rose appearing despite being trapped in a parallel world. Even though the finale explains how she is returning, some of her appearances are never explained. For example in "Midnight" she appears on a screen on another planet centuries into the future, which doesn't coincide with what was already seen. In "Turn Left" she somehow has knowledge of all the events and is able to appear at significant moments to help Donna, which is never explained either. Also everything at the end of "Turn Left" reading Bad Wolf is never really given an explanation.
  • In "The Time Meddler", the Monk is a Time Lord with a TARDIS of his own, whose plan is to blow up a fleet of invading Vikings with a nuclear bazooka. The Doctor sabotages the Monk's TARDIS, but the Monk still has the bazooka and its ammunition, so there's no reason why he can't still blow up the Vikings as he planned. In the novelisation a scene is added to fix the hole: The Doctor and his companions put the ammunition in the Monk's TARDIS before sabotaging it, rendering it inaccessible.
• Under the Dome: In season 2 episode 11, Don Barbara asks Hunter where the entrance to the Dome even though Hunter texted him the location when he went through.
• House of Anubis: Season 3's Big Bad is the "reawakened" Robert Frobisher-Smythe, who was basically in a hundred year long coma and living in some sort of tank. However, he was seen in the first season as a spirit, meaning he was Retconned into still being alive with no explanation.
• An early episode of Pretty Little Liars had Emily open a box of Alpha-Bits in the school cafeteria to find it full of "A" pieces (marking it as a message from the Big Bad). If she has a preference for that brand of cereal, then it's logical enough that A might assume she would choose it, but there's no way that A could know which specific box she would choose, nor is there any indication that any other boxes were similarly tampered with. A displays many other such examples of being The Omniscient and hardly any of them are explained.
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: "Paradise Lost" has a flashback in which a young Gideon Malick and his brother Nathaniel visit Werner Reinhardt in prison. They refer to Reinhardt as Daniel Whitehall, his present-day alias, which he did not begin to use until after he was freed.
• In the fourth episode of Robin Hood season three, Kate the village girl decides to join the outlaws in Sherwood Forest. She arrives with nothing but the clothes on her back, and yet in the very next episode, she's wearing a brand new green dress. It's never been seen before, and none of the other outlaws are female. So where did it come from? Perhaps even stranger is the fact that she and her family have been living in Locksley all their lives, yet although Robin recognizes Kate's mother in sight and greets her by name, he has no idea who Kate (a full-grown woman) is when they meet on-screen for the first time.
• In the Blackadder II episode "Head", after Farrow's execution, Percy describes him as a tall man with a loud, clear voice, which we later learn is a more-or-less accurate description of Lord Farrow. However, it's later revealed that the man who was executed wasn't Farrow, but Ponsonby, who is a small man with one leg and a speech impediment. Percy couldn't possibly have seen the man he described at the execution.
• Person of Interest:
  • "Provenance" features Team Machine helping gymnast-turned-thief Kelli Lin steal a Gutenberg Bible from a high security vault (for the right reasons; her daughter is being held hostage). The episode shows in great detail the lengths that Shaw and Kelli have to go to to even get to the book: They use fake fingerprints to beat a biometric scanner, then Shaw lifts Kelli to an overhead bar, after which Kelli swings her way into the cage where the book is being held. When the guards catch on to the theft and burst in to the vault, Kelli and Shaw are gone, along with the book. No explanation is given as to how Kelli got out of the cage without Shaw's help, how she held onto the book while doing so, or how she and Shaw got out of the room.
• In The Twilight Zone Episode "Not All Men," the ending reveals the rocks don't have any powers at all, and the violent incidents and riot were all due to the innate rage always present in men. This reveal was almost certainly written late into production, because whenever we see one of the men gets angry, their eyes turn red, bulging veins appear on their faces, and they gain extra strength. If the men were going through these changes before the meteor shower, a bunch of rocks should be the least of this town's worries. Not to mention, beggars belief to think all men could all turn spontaneously violent in the same way instantly. Did they all somehow have identical thoughts about just going berserk when the meteors fell?
• The Barrier:
  • One plot point is that Hugo and Julia accidentally wind up working for the family in which the wife (Alma) is running the scientific institute in which Hugo's daughter Marta is secretly detained, all while believing that the girl was taken away to a colony for the children of unemployed parents. Hugo and Julia find the science center and Marta quickly enough and go to their employers to ask for an explanation. In his angry rant, Hugo yells at Alma for lying about Marta being in a colony. The person who gave Hugo (and the rest of the family) the idea that Marta was in a colony is their neighborhood government informer, not Alma. Alma is implied to have simply made the same assumption as the informer when told by Hugo that his daughter had been taken away, while at worse being guilty of not considering the possibility that the science institute may have Hugo's daughter in its custody. During the same event, Julia claims that Marta and the other children detained in the institute had been medicated, while neither the dead children she and Hugo saw in the institute nor the brief exchange Hugo managed to have with Marta through a closed door gave them any direct evidence this was happening.
  • During a one-episode subplot, Álex is able to use temporary pass he was given earlier to enter the enclave in which the elites live, but gets in trouble while trying to use it to leave because its exit code isn't activated. Álex was initially given the pass so he could leave the enclave on his own after driving one of its residents back home, so he's having the complete reverse of the problem that he should be having.
  • One scene relies on Álex recognizing Rai, whom he was never seen encountering during his visits to the Covarrubias house.
  • How Emilia was let into the enclave for the elites in the penultimate episode, especially without anyone in the Covarrubias household knowing in advance, at a point where security was tighter than usual, is never addressed. Any previous occurrence of Hugo and Julia, the only members of the family with a permanent pass into the enclave, going in or out with someone else, barring one with a conveniently timed [noravirus patient in the line, has required calling someone from the Covarrubias household to sort the situation out.
• In Arrow, Al-Ow-Al catches one of Oliver's arrows and says that arrows are inefficient projectiles and he's surprised people are still afraid of them. So why did he train the Dark Archer in their use? Ra's would disagree for that matter, having trained his daughters to be highly skilled archers. Arrows are kind of the League's thing.
• In he Titans (2018) episode "The Call Is Coming From Inside The House" Gotham City is under martial law, supplies are scarce, and the one shop that is shown to be open has raised their prices accordingly. Despite this, Scarecrow has no trouble ordering a pizza and having it delivered to Wayne Manor, because the story requires that he kidnap the delivery boy as a test subject.
• Roswell, New Mexico: There are three different birth and death dates given for Rosa, along with an inconsistency in regards to her age versus the year after she's resurrected.
• One well-known one in Bones is that it was never explained how the Gravedigger, Heather Taffet, managed to bury the vehicles her victims were trapped in. And when she traps Booth in “The Hero in the Hold” she knocks him out. But how would she move the dead weight of a man a good deal larger than herself? Fans speculate she had help from someone else.
• The Pilot Movie for The Waltons has an example of a timeline far too strict for events to happen logically. John Walton, the father of the family, is missing for most of the story and cell phones hadn't been invented yet, but he arrives home nonetheless, and with gifts for Christmas! There's an emotional climax where John-Boy's Christmas gift was a series of paper tablets, along with his father giving John-Boy his acceptance to pursue a career in writing. How did he know John-Boy wanted to be a writer? He had a talk with his mother about it and his worries about whether the family could afford to invest in him. The next time either of them see or speak to John, he's brought that bag of gifts...
• Irma Vep: Mira and other actors point out problems with Les Vampires' plot, for instance she asks why a very skilled criminal gang would write down their secrets in a red codebook (however René notes people do that with passwords even now, so she concedes the point on that one).

Mythology And Religion

• In Norse Mythology the goddess Sif supposedly had really beautiful blond hair, so much that at one point Loki decided to cut it off just to a dick. When her husband Thor found out, he threatened to kill Loki, but decided to spare him on the grounds that he give her new hair, at which point he basically "forged" some new hair out of gold and attached it to her head. The problem being: there's absolutely no explanation for why her hair wouldn't just grow back normally, as she's a goddess and mere mortals regrow hair that's cut off all the time. (To be fair, only a few fragments of stories about Sif survive, so the original myth may well have actually explained this part.)
• In Greek Mythology Hephaestus became permanently handicapped after falling off Mount Olympus. However, in another myth Zeus gives birth to Athena via his head bursting open and her coming out. Despite this, Zeus's head completely heals, and he's no worse for wear. Why only some Greek Gods have a Healing Factor and others don't is never explained.

Professional Wrestling

• Edge and Christian being portrayed as brothers, then later as childhood friends. As close as they are, even a single line acknowledging the "brother" thing as either earned/chosen ties or an in-joke between the two would suffice, yet this has never come up.
• Kane has had several plot holes. One of them is his involvement in the infamous "Katie Vick" storyline. Apparently, Kane was partying, drinking, and driving with his girlfriend, Katie Vick, despite the fact that his character was supposed to have been secluded from society during that time. Speaking of Kane, his hair is a plot hole. Before his "official" unmasking, Kane has had his mask removed on a few occasions, albeit the hair grown from his head is covering his face. On the night of his "official" unmasking, Kane takes off his mask that has a wig attached, which is used to cover the little hair on his head that remained from the fire that burned him as a child. Another thing to note is that Evolution took off Kane's mask five months prior to his "official" unmasking, and yet Kane still had a full head of hair when he had his mask taken off.
  • Paul Bearer claiming to be Kane's "father" created the first problem in Kane's backstory. Paul originally claimed that he first met Kane when he went to work at Kane and Taker's family's funeral home. The only way for all of that to be true would have been if Paul hadn't been told by the mother that he had a "son," and they never resolved that part.
• For TNA's 2010 Victory Road PPV the Knockouts' title match had the stipulation where if either of champion Madison Rayne's teammates - Lacey Von Erich and Velvet Sky - interfered, the belt would go to Angelina Love. At the end of the match, a masked biker woman drove into the arena and attacked Angelina. The referee called for a disqualification...and awarded the title to Angelina Love, assuming it was either Velvet or Lacey under the mask. The woman refused to reveal her face and yet the referee still awarded the title to Angelina. It was actually Tara under the mask yet it made no sense for her to keep her face hidden for weeks when she could have taken off the mask to reveal who she was and thus let Madison keep the title. Furthermore why would Madison have her attacker wear a mask if it wasn't Velvet or Lacey? The stipulation only said Madison would lose if either of them interfered. It would only be a simple DQ if anyone else interfered. And when it was confirmed that it hadn't been Velvet or Lacey under the mask, the title switch to Angelina was still counted despite being a bad call by the referee.
• Lexxus achieved her second WSU Uncensored Rumble victory in 2012 the way some WWE wrestlers can be expected to. She hid under the ring until the rumble was all but over, then eliminated the supposed winner. Uncensored rumble entrants are eliminated by leaving the ring though, so Lexxus throwing Alicia out after the fact should have meant nothing. Alicia's music was playing before Lexxus even did anything.
• Q.T Marshall had this come up on the 3/24/21 Episode of AEW Dynamite when he brought up his wife in real life. This goes against the Kayfabe relationship between Allie/aka The Bunny, though, it might be intentional to gain some heel heat or just an oversight.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons: The third edition book Elder Evils has various Eldritch Abominations that the gods sealed away somehow, and the implication is that they are so scary/powerful that even the gods fear them and can't destroy them permanently. The problem? The most powerful of the EE Es is CR 25. The Maximum level for player characters (not counting epic level) is 20, meaning a CR 25 monster is basically a really hard, but still winnable fight if you use good tactics and get lucky. While the gods aren't given C Rs, even the demigods are far more powerful than a level 20 (or even 25) group of players, meaning the Elder Evils realistically should pose no threat to them. While this can be explained out-of-universe as a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation, there's absolutely no in-universe explanation for this. It could perhaps be Hand Waved as them being weakend by being imprisoned for so long, but there's no hint of this in-universe, and it doesn't explain why the gods don't just destroy them while they are in their weakened state.

Theatre

• In Rodgers and Hammerstein's backstage musical Me and Juliet, some of the theatergoers are humming tunes from the Show Within a Show during intermission: "Marriage Type Love", "No Other Love", "It's Me". The problem here is that "It's Me" was only sung backstage as a song about acting, so the in-universe audience shouldn't have heard it. Hammerstein privately acknowledged this mistake.
• Shakespeare's Julius Caesar featured a pretty big one: just before Caesar was assassinated, a random person is shown writing a letter to Caesar about the treachery of his senate - who this man is, how he knows about the treachery, and why he knows every single person involved in the plot is never told - it turns out to be irrelevant, however, as he never delivers the letter anyway.

Theme Parks

• At Universal Studios:
  • All of Hogwarts at first can be seen at a Quidditch game in Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, but just a mere minute later appear at the Great Hall to celebrate.
  • In the former Jimmy Neutron's Nicktoon Blast, King Goobot is first seen on the Yolkian Planet, but then makes it to Earth in the ride's finale in just under a minute, despite it being well-established that the Yolkian Planet is quite a distance away from Earth.

Video Games

• In Corpse Party: Book of Shadows it's stated that those that died in the previous loop cannot be saved and are marked for death (literally-they have marks that hint how they will die)- like Mayu for example... Problem is that the series has hinted several times that all Wrong endings are canon, which opens up a ton of questions. Blood Drive opens more questions as the game not only states that all timelines converge in the Nirvana and during a point of the game almost everybody dies, except Ayumi... And then Sachiko loops time so that she can prevent the deaths-which she does... Yeah, it's weird.
• Metroid:
  • In Metroid Prime, the eponymous creature is sealed inside the impact crater by a Chozo spell, which was placed to prevent the phazon from further infecting the planet. However, a scan in the game indicated that the Space Pirates had captured the creature for study and imprisoned it in their lab, where it proceeded to steal a lot of weaponry and escape back to the crater. This warrants the question: how did the pirates and/or Metroid Prime both bypass the Chozo seal, when you yourself couldn't get through it until you completed the late-game MacGuffin Fetch Quest to remove the seal? The EU version and the Trilogy version fixed this plot hole: In those, the Space Pirates merely detects a creature inside the crater and wastes a lot of time and effort trying to break the seal and failing. They never actually find Metroid Prime. Though now it has all those beam weapons/vulnerabilities just because.
  • Metroid: Other M rips a big one into the plot of Metroid Fusion. As "Other M" is set between Super Metroid and "Fusion", Samus should have considered the possibility of the Federation illegally breeding Metroids on the B.S.L. (Biologic Space Labs) station as they already did on the Bottle Ship. Samus' Mission Control even asks her if she really didn't suspect anything when she saw Sector 1, a perfect replica of SR388's (the homeworld of the Metroids) ecosystem, which comes off as Lampshade Hanging despite the fact that the plothole didn't exist when that line was written.
• Neverwinter Nights.
  • Consider this situation: the city of Neverwinter has been struck by a plague that can only be cured with specific components from a variety of magical creatures. This is a fantasy world where a powerful mage can teleport stuff easily long-distance. Do they just send the reagents and produce a cure that afternoon? No, they send the creatures themselves; this may be a Justified Trope, because teleporting is expensive, but is Lord Nasher really going to complain about the fees when lives are in danger? This is just the beginning; It gets much, much worse. When the creatures escape from the least defensible region of the structure they're being held in, by teleporting, even if they don't actually have that ability, they disappear into the four main outlying areas of the city. Then, instead of the heroic paladin going out to look for them (using some flimsy excuse about a tracking spell), a weak and inexperienced adventurer is sent out to get them. Complete with a Hand Wave about the cockatrice being in a box because they didn't actually have a cockatrice monster model. This is all in the first act.
  • No excuse is ever given for Neverwinter not simply requesting new creatures (or rather, the parts from said creatures) from various other cities and have them teleported there immediately. None of the creatures are unique specimens.
• Baldur's Gate II reveals around mid-game that Imoen is a child of Bhaal too. We also know that the Bhaalspawn turn into dust when they die, as their essence return to Bhaal himself (seen in the cutscenes when the main character dies and in the final cutscene of the first game when the Big Bad dies). Then why Imoen could die so many times in the first game and be also resurrected? To the point that the character's death could occur at the very first moment while the resurrection after all the quests before the final battle, if the player wishes so. This happens in the sequel too after you free her from Spellhold and she joins back your party, and it's more blatant that you could leave her dead until after you have already released her soul from Bodhi. It is later lampshaded in the expansion (see below the lampshaded hanging section).
• Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal:
  • Retcons the protagonist's childhood so that their mother was a priestess of Bhaal who belonged to a cult that was trying to sacrifice Bhaalspawn children to effect his resurrection. This ceases to make sense when you try to figure out the timeline: The game takes place in the year 1369 and the protagonist is twenty years old at the beginning of the first game a year earlier and was an infant when the cult was active. But Bhaal, who had sired his mortal children to be fuel for his eventual resurrection after his foreseen death, died in 1358. So in fact the evil cult was trying to sacrifice the children while he was still alive, which at the very least would mean they had misunderstood his plans very badly.
  • More to the point, the flashback also reveals that the protagonist was apparently conceived during the Time of Troubles, which also happened in 1358. So the main character suddenly is ten years old?
• Gaia Online features many of them, which they often try to fill in later, with mixed results. Here's a small sampling of the ones that haven't been filled in yet.
  • During the Halloween 2k5 Story Line, Ian finds a pill bottle that apparently reveals that his romantic rival Gino is hiding a terrible secret from Sasha. Meanwhile, the Mansion is inexplicably lit on fire. We never find out who started the fire, nor what was in those pill bottles.
  • In zOMG!, it is stated that all the towns are completely cut off from each other due to things coming to life and attacking people. It's implied that Aekea is fighting off its factory equipment, that all the boats to Isle De Gambino have been closed, and that people attempting to walk to Durem are disappearing. And yet in the Wapanese comic, all of the NPCs are able to travel from town to town without any issues.
• Mega Man 7 has two different plot holes depending on the version. In the original, it was stated that Mega Man couldn't kill Dr. Wily due to robotic laws preventing him from harming a human. Why would Wily have to beg for mercy in all previous games and let Mega Man arrest him in 6? In the American version, Mega Man disregards those laws and tries to kill Wily. There is no explanation why he didn't try to kill Wily in all subsequent games. Admittedly, Mega Man is a nice robot, and killing Wily would not have been his first choice when he would actually have been able to do it. It took him seven games to finally realize Wily is beyond redemption.
  • The Mega Man X series' titular protagonist is supposedly special since he is the first robot to have free will. Despite this, the classic series (to which the X series is a sequel to) has shown robots seemingly able to do what they like, even if they would logically not be programmed for it. Three big examples are Ballade from Mega Man IV, who despite being made by Wily as a Mega Man Killer purposefully saves Mega Man's life at the cost of his own, Sheep Man, who can get bored and has changed several jobs out of boredom, and Strike Man, who even before the Roboenza outbreak was deliberately harming other players he didn't like, the First Law of Robotics be damned.
• In Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, depending on the choices you make, Nicholai will sometimes appear at the gas station and be in the room when it explodes, destroying an entire city block. He survives this unscathed, and without any Plot Virus Hand Wave. The game also creates contradictions with Resident Evil 2, which the game is supposed to take place before and after it. It's stated that the entire city was quarantined so that no one could get in or out of the city, yet in Resident Evil 2, Leon and Claire casually drive into the city without anything blocking their way and the city itself looks more abandoned than destroyed. Likewise, when Jill explores the RPD building, all the doors leading to the east and west hallways (as well as the door near the S.T.A.R.S. office leading to the library) are boarded up. For Leon and Claire, the doors leading to the hallways are simply electronically locked and requires a key card to unlock.
• Resident Evil – Code: Veronica begins with Claire Redfield getting captured by Umbrella and sent to a remote prison while searching for the whereabouts of her brother, Chris. Early on, her partner Steve checks a computer and finds a file on Chris, which prompts Claire to hop on and send an e-mail to ally Leon Kennedy, who evidently has the means to in get in touch with Chris, and tells Leon to warn her brother that Umbrella is keeping tabs on him. ...Now, were you able to spot the problem with this?
• In the first God of War, Kratos opens Pandora's Box, absorbs the power to kill a god within, and kills Ares. In God of War III, Kratos is trying to find Pandora's Box, absorb the power to kill a god within, and kill Zeus. He accomplishes the first two steps, only to discover that duh, he already did step three. What, did everyone think it just didn't take the first time? Especially given that Kratos has been killing gods left and right ever since, including killing Poseidon and Hermes just hours earlier? Furthermore, Zeus makes it clear that the box, which contained both the evils of the Titan's war which corrupted the gods and the power to kill him, was never supposed to have been opened in the first place. So why did he ever help Kratos reach it?
  • On top of that, at some point between the two games, Zeus puts together an elaborate mechanism to keep Pandora's Box away from intruders (see: Kratos). Reaching the box now requires such things as manipulating the chain that keeps the planes together and stopping a fire that can burn even the Gods. As implied above, there is nothing in the box, and Zeus knows this! And even if the empty box had value, there's still a perfectly good temple for storing it on the back of Cronos!
• In Tower of Heaven the the book of laws states you shall not touch golden blocks, but when the book shatters and all laws are nullified, golden blocks still kill you. Retconned in the flash version which changes them to skull blocks.
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl: In the subspace emissary, Pit (who has wings) tries and fails to attack the airborne Ancient Minister. This creates a plot hole because it is never explained in game that he (supposedly) can't actually fly. The fact that he does anyway when the player is controlling him just makes things more confusing. Furthermore, why he and Mario didn't try to use their projectile attacks on the Ancient Minister is never explained.
• Fallout 3:
  • Once you retrieve the G.E.C.K. in Vault 87, you are ambushed and captured by Enclave troops before you get out. Problem is, the main door of Vault 87 is broken and surrounded by deadly radiation, so the only way in is the back door through Little Lamplight. But the residents of Little Lamplight wouldn't have let the Enclave troops in, and there's nothing to suggest the Enclave forced their way through. The main door is still broken and sealed... come to think of it, how do the Super Mutants get out?
  • The main door may still work somehow, even though a nuke fell on the tunnel. The entrances to the room with the main door are sealed to the player, but the Enclave ambush comes from the inaccessible lobby.
• In Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill was the favorite vacation spot of Mary and James Sunderland. However, Mary died after 3 years of illness. How could they have vacationed in Silent Hill when the town has been abandoned for years? (The town's local cult was at the height of its power in the mid-1970s, SH 1 is set in 1983, and SH 2 is set in 1993.)
• There's one very glaring plot hole in Agarest Senki 2 that's found at the beginning of the game, however it won't be much a plot hole until you do a New Game Plus. At the beginning of the game, Aina heals Weiss from his injuries after getting blown off somewhere from where he and Fasti were at. Not much of a big deal right? Play through the game until The Reveal shows up and wonder if Weiss didn't kill Chaos and was stabbed by Fasti, to stab Chaos, then how come Weiss doesn't have a tear on his shirt back and front? Unless somehow Chaos hijacked Weiss' body and male shirts can magically heal, or that Chaos copied Weiss and his clothes while the real Weiss got disintegrated from the blast of the explosion, the world may never know.
• In Gears of War, the Kryll are a swarm of flying piranhas that savagely attack anything that falls into darkness and consumes them in seconds. This is true of human and locust alike, only General RAAM can walk amongst Kryll without any damage and his means for doing this are never explained. In the DLC campaign "RAAM's Shadow" for 3 (chronologically earlier), normal Locust walk among Kryll just fine and indeed even RAAM's lieutenants are able to command the Kryll.
• There are many plot holes in the Jak and Daxter series, most of them induced by Sig. Being a friend of the titular heroes, working for Krew and being a spy for Damas should give him a hell of a lot of information about everything, but somehow he never puts two and two together. The most egregious example is about Jak's relation to Damas: Sig was sent to Haven to look for Damas's son Mar. The Kid carries the seal of Mar around his neck that indicates he might be the lost heir to the throne. Damas, of the House of Mar, was Haven's ruler before he was cast out. Logically, Sig should at least suspect that the Kid might be related to Damas, but doesn't. It gets worse when it turns out the Kid is Jak, who from that point on carries the Kid's seal with him, and people on occasion use it to remind him who he is.
• Neverwinter Nights 2 takes some Artistic License with the rules of magic in the Forgotten Realms setting. No less than three divine spellcasters lack patron deities. Some D&D settings allow this, but FR is not among them. Zhjaeve can be handwaved as venerating the githzerai god-king Zerthimon, and Gannayev-of-Dreams puts his faith in the spirits of the land, but Bishop has no plausible excuse, especially since the one explanation that would allow it^{specifically,}  that one of the gods, Malar perhaps, has chosen to grant him spells without direct worship is invalidated by what becomes of his soul in Mask of the Betrayer.
• Heavy Rain has notable problem: the nature of Ethan's blackouts are never explained, despite the blackouts being the sole reason why the police were after Ethan. Not only this, the blackouts contained knowledge about the Origami Killer Ethan couldn't possibly have, such as the faces of victims he's never met. In a deleted scenes montage, Word of God stated that the Origami Killer and Ethan developed a telepathic link at the start of the game when the killer witnessed Ethan risking his life for his son. After some consideration, they figured that the plot hole was better than that explanation.
  • All three of the characters have their own plot line to find the address where the Origami Killer is holding Shaun. Should Madison find it, she has the option of calling one of the other two leads to tell them, allowing them to show up for the finale. Madison has no way of knowing Norman Jayden's phone number, as they never meet in the story. Further, she insists that she only has time to call one of the two, even though each call only takes a few seconds.
• In Persona 4: Arena, none of the characters from Persona 4 have upgraded personas. This is largely understandable as the characters gaining their ultimate personas is by maxing out their social links which, in the previous game, is optional, although some scenes imply that they did max out those Social Links (for example, Yukiko decided to stay in Inaba and inherit her family's inn). However, there is one exception, Teddie's social link progresses automatically with the story, which results in his persona transforming from Kintoki-Doji into Kamui. However, like the rest of the investigation team, he uses his original persona and his ultimate persona is never even mentioned.
• In Five Nights at Freddy's, the game takes place over a series of five (or seven, if you unlock them) nights, where you play as the security guard trying to keep himself safe for the night from killer animatronics... it is never properly explained why the player character keeps returning to the job after the first night, when he first figures out that the animatronics are vicious. There have been many theories to explain this, one of the most popular being that the player does it for the thrill of it, given Freddy's use of "Toreador" from Carmen^note Specifically, the chorus which describes how the glory and thrill of bullfighting is worth the risk of death it carries. The final game implicitly gives an explanation by indicating that the player characters of all the games are just Michal Afton, son of the series Big Bad, trying to subvert his father's work under different identities.
• Ni no Kuni:
  • One of them appears early in the game when Olliver goes back to our world. People from our world cannot see nor hear people from the other world, so when Olliver asks a lady for the information he needs and right in the middle of the conversation starts to talk with his friendly magical fairy, the lady doesn't even lift an eyebrow or gets surprised of the fact that a kid who just lost his mom a while ago is talking to himself all of a sudden. Even worse, she carries on with the conversation as if nothing happened. This rule of "nobody can see magic or people from the other world" gets violated every once in a while as the character do not even care about the consequences of using magic or talking to somebody that cannot be seen by others. Another example of this is when the characters use a spell to go from one world to another in the middle of the street and nobody wonders how or why that kid vanished into thin air.
  • There is more problems with the gateway spell than that. Apparently the first time you use it you are told that you need a large space in order to cast the gateway spell, the one that will allow you to travel through worlds, so the characters go to the town square, summon a Cool Gate, and use it to go the other magical world. Afterwards this rule of "can only be cast in large spaces" is just ignored, as you can cast it anywhere, and the gate is nowhere to be seen anymore. No explanation given, of course.
  • An even major example comes later in the game. The characters go back to Al Mamoon so they can ask for an audience with the Cowlipha to get a permit to use a ship. The Cowlipha is apparently brokenhearted and her heart lacks restraint, so the characters are told to go wander the city asking in every shop for somebody with a lot of restraint to spare. The plot hole comes because the locket, the object used to stock pieces of heart, glows when somebody having some quality to spare from his heart is near. The game decided to just break that rule in this particular moment and have you wander around town aimlessly looking for something as vague as "somebody with a lot of restraint" when the person that you were looking for was none other that the Cowlipha's servant, the person who asked you for help, accompanied you through all this miniquest, and was even present when you discovered that she was brokenhearted and needed restraint. During all this the locket didn't shine even once.
• In The Walking Dead episode 5 Vernon and his small group of cancer survivors steal the boat on a trailer that the main characters had been preparing and disappear. However, the previous episode established that they were somewhat weak and several needed medication to live, a boat that size weighs tons and requires a truck to move, the villains of Crawford had stripped every single car in town for parts, and both Crawford and Savannah proper were overrun by a massive walker horde.
• Star Trek Online had one you could fly the Enterprise through in its fourth anniversary featured episode whose simplest explanation invalidates the entire justification for the Dyson Battlezone launched two months earlier. During the plot, you have to trigger an Iconian space gate to stop the entire Solanae Dyson Sphere from jumping itself someplace else. It's powered by Omega molecules, and Tuvok says that allowing it to jump will consume enough molecules that it will wipe out warp travel throughout the galaxy. Then you find out that the Dyson sphere from TNG: "Relics" jumped itself when nobody was looking. Problem: What's good for the goose is good for the gander, Cryptic. Either there is now no warp travel anywhere in the galaxy (not true), or every physicist in the Alpha Quadrant has been talking out of his ass for two months and the Dyson spheres' Omega molecules are perfectly safe power sources. Or the Relics sphere uses something else than Omega molecules for power (entirely possible, since the Enterprise's sensors didn't pick up any in Relics), but in that case the Relics sphere becomes even more important than claimed, since it means everyone should be interested in what it used instead, which no-one seems to be.
• Borderlands justifies its checkpoints as "New-U Stations", which digitally reconstruct your body when you die, and are owned by the Hyperion Corporation. It raises a bit of Fridge Logic - namely, why do they only work for certain people? This can be easily overlooked in the first game, but not in the sequel, where the Big Bad is the president of the Hyperion Corporation. They don't even revive his own loved ones!
  • Word of God is that the New-U stations are a gameplay mechanic and do not actually exist in-universe, but the stations' mocking dialogue added for Rule of Funny combined with the game's Affectionate Parody nature caused confusion over this. This is also the reason why Roland's Plotline Death sticks despite him using the stations as a playable character in the first game. Given a nod in the Tiny Tina DLC:
    (After resurrecting the player) Female Voice: Warning: This New-U station is NOT canon!
• Danganronpa
  • In Danganronpa Zero, Kamishiro states that the name Izuru Kamukura is not on school file. Causes problems when it is later stated in the franchise that is the name of the school's founder. Why that isn't on file is never explained.
  • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair:
    • It is stated that the followers of Junko Enoshima surgically bound to themselves parts of Enoshima's dead body. One wonders how this is possible when, in Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Enoshima's death concluded in her being smashed by a metal press. Kinda hard to get an intact hand from a bloody stain.
    • Chapter 0 is pretty much one huge plot hole both in-game and in hindsight. For one thing, Komaeda has no idea what Kamukura's going to do, when Enoshima says that her followers all knew about the AI plan. This can be chalked up to Unreliable Expositor.
    • Most of the plot holes turn out to be foreshadowing by the time Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School rolls around. Enoshima was lying about almost everything, and Kamukura never really took part in the Ultimate Despair's doings. While Komaeda and Kamukura did meet, it's implied he had no memories of it.
• Plot holes, inconsistencies and contradictory explanations are dime a dozen in Touhou Project, which, it's worth remembering, is created by one guy who is piss-drunk more often than not. So much that the fans have come up with a meme to explain them. If you spot an Plot Hole in any Touhou materials, don't fret, just turn to one of the following convenient, catch-all explanations: 1) magic, 2) Eirin's shady new drug, 3) Yukari is fooling around again, or 4) it's a Moriya Shrine conspiracy. In actual canon this comes about due to the sheer amount of Unreliable Narrators in the series. Wild and Horned Hermit and Forbidden Scrollery make a point out of this by showing Reimu with seemingly contradictory personalities due to the two stories being told from different perspectives.
• The Street Fighter Alpha series (specifically Alpha 3) introduces one as it relates to Juli, one of the young women M. Bison's Shadaloo organization kidnapped, brainwashed, and trained into elite assassin bodyguards known as the Dolls. Most of the Dolls are roughly named after a month of the year in their language of origin. Juli operates as part of a pair with Juni, both hailing from Germany (their names are German for July and June respectively). However, T.Hawk's ending reveals that Juli is actually Julia, a girl from T.Hawk's Thunderfoot tribe who he's been searching for ever since she was kidnapped. Why is this a plot hole? The Thunderfoot tribe are Native Americans set in Mexico.
  • This is likely the result of a split-second executive decision. The original intent was for Noembelu (Spanish for November), a Native American Mexican like T.Hawk, to be the missing Doll he's searching for, but the staff went with Juli instead since the name transition had an ironic ease to it and they didn't want to put in the effort to make Noembelu into a playable character. The UDON comics patch up this plot hole by explaining that Julia was the daughter of a German doctor who lived with and helped care for the Thunderfoot tribe, while Noembelu actually was a pure Thunderfoot girl originally called Little Eagle.
• Due to how much plot it has, Ace Attorney naturally has plenty, though most of them are small and more like lapses in logic than actual plot holes.
  • In Rise from the Ashes, Gant kills Detective Goodman in the evidence room, and while cleaning up the crime scene accidentally misses a bloody handprint, which is later unwittingly covered by Meekins moving a Blue Badger stand in front of it. However, in between these events, it's mentioned Edgeworth went to the evidence room to retrieve a screwdriver (which was in fact part of Gant's plan to have him unknowingly help in the cover-up). How on earth didn't he notice a bloody handprint on the wall?
  • In the second case of Justice for All, a major deal is made about Maya's clothing having a bullet-hole caused by the victim's Last Breath Bullet that is not present in the photos which show her supposedly in the aftermath of the murder. At the end of the case, this is explained as being because the culprit wearing a spare set of clothes that wasn't hit, while the bullet grazed Maya while she was unconscious. However, another crucial part of the case is the key for the chamber the murder occurred in was on Maya's person, but then ended up in the incinerator after the murder. This is explained as being because the culprits hurriedly switched Maya's clothes with the bloodstained set to frame her, but how then is the bullet-hole there?
  • A huge one occurs at the end of Trials and Tribulations. After the final trial, Phoenix asks Maya why she channelled Dahlia in the aftermath of the murder, to which Maya says Mia told her to to keep herself safe. Except how did Mia know Dahlia was attacking Maya in the first place? Mia has no way of knowing Dahlia's Fey relations and thus a reason Dahlia would be there trying to kill Maya, or even that Dahlia had died, as that had happened years after Mia herself did. Even if we're to assume she did have a way, it is a crucial plot point that it was so dark that Maya had no way of seeing her attackers face, hence her associating with the red light from Godot's visor. Maya has never met nor heard of Dahlia before also, and passed out right after Dahlia was stabbed, meaning she logically wouldn't even know about her attacker being a channeled spirit, and even if she did see Dahlia properly, she would've only assumed it was Iris, as Dahlia had disguised herself as her in order to frame Iris for Maya's assassination. Again, preventing any way of Mia knowing Dahlia was after Maya's life.
  • An especially baffling example is present in the first case of Apollo Justice. A huge amount of the case focuses on the victim, Shadi Smith, attempting to ruin Phoenix's career in a rigged poker game. This becomes head-tilting when it's revealed near the end of the game that Shadi is actually Zak Grammyae, the defendant of Phoenix's last case and the biological father of Phoenix's adopted daughter Trucy, and had specifically met with Phoenix that night specifically to pass over the rights of Magnifi Grammrye's magic tricks onto her. Quite why he would do that just to try and ruin Phoenix's career is never explained.
    • Related to the above is in the final trial, we learn that Phoenix was disbarred because he presented a forged page from the victim's diary that proved that the victim was still alive after Zak had left the scene. However, we later learn that Zak had the real diary page the entire time. Why did he not give it to Phoenix or, better yet, present it to the police which would have cleared him from the get go? Even stranger is that a motive for him hiding the diary page could be explained as him not wanting suspicion to come onto Valant, who would be suspected if it was proven that Zak hadn't killed the victim. However, in the talk where he reveals that he had the diary page the whole time, he is also surprised that Valant was suspected at all.
  • The motive to the third case of Apollo Justice is that Machi and Daryan, the defendant and culprit, were accomplices in a plot to smuggle out cocoons from Machi's home country Borginia, a crime worthy of death in Borginia itself, with the intent to sell them to the Chief Justice as a cure to his grandsons incurable illness, and the victim was an interpol agent investigating the smuggling plot, who Daryan killed and framed Machi for. This explanation, beyond coming out of nowhere, carries an avalanche of questions which the game never explains:
    • Why would a police detective who doubles as the frontman to a famous rock band and a 14-year-old orphan who works as a pianist to a world-famous singer be so in need of money that they'd risk the death penalty just for cash? Furthermore, why didn't Machi ask Lamioir for the money he needed, when we see first hand that she'd more than happily comply?
    • If the supposedly incurable illness has a proven cure, why would the Chief Justice need to resort to buying off from criminals to get his grandson cured? Surely someone of such political power would be able to organize the necessary measures with the Borginian government through legal measures, making the motive meaningless.
    • How did Daryan and Machi get in contact? It's stated multiple times that none of the Gavineers besides Klavier himself ever went to Borginia, and that the collaboration with Lamioir only occured off a chance meeting in a bar, so how did Daryan ever establish work with a child who not only he'd have never directly met, but who barely even speaks English?
    • Why did Daryan even kill Agent LeTouse to begin with? It's a crucial plot point in the cases climax that there is no evidence linking Daryan with the smuggling operation outside of a plausible theory on how he carried out the murder, requiring Machi to confess to his part in the smuggling to get him arrested. If Daryan just kept quiet, all the evidence for the smuggling would just fall onto Machi while he'd get away scott-free, making the murder little more than an unnecessary risk. Furthermore, if both Klavier and Lamioir were unaware that LeTouse was an undercover agent, had did Daryan figure it out, and even make the preporations for the plan to kill him?
  • In the second case of Spirit of Justice, the big trick to the murder is the victim's suspension cord was attached to the giant dragon prop, which once dropped pulled the victim up into the rafters and a sword specially concealed for the murder to occur without the culprit even being there. Sounds fine...except the victim had gone under the stage before the murder, and after emerging deliberately played dead until he was unwittingly killed. Did the cord somehow pass through the floorboards?
  • In the final case of Spirt of Justice, the heroes need to take a private plan from Edgeworth to return to Khura'in due to Dhurke being a wanted criminal in the country, with the characters then getting involved in the murder of Inga shortly after arriving. However, Dhurke's Number Two Datz, who was in America/Japan as well, was somehow fighting the royal Secret Police during the murder, which happened hours before the rest of the group even got in the country.
  • At the end of the third case of The Great Ace Attorney Adventures, a big deal is made about the trunk in the omnibus where Gina, the surprise extra witness to the case, was hiding was in fact filled with junk (something confirmed if the player checks the omnibus before the recess), revealing it to have just been part of the plan by the defendent, Magnus McGuilded, to manipulate evidence. However, later on, we learn that Gina was in the trunk that night, having directly overheard the murder occur, and afterwards was blackmailed into acting as an accomplice during the trial. Which raises the question, where on earth did the junk come from if it wasn't there on the night of the murder, espcially when any ability to tamper with the crime scene that night would've rendered the plan moot?
• Final Fantasy VII, Aerith's powers allow her to talk to the spirits of the dead and to 'feel' when people have died, yet when Cloud asks her about her former boyfriend Zack (who is dead), she says she has no idea where he is, and even says she assumes he found someone else. Crisis Core addresses this, making it clear that Aerith knew he was still alive for five years after they broke up, felt it when he died, and was lying to Cloud.
• In Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge, Roger Wilco orders a whistle via mail required to solve a later puzzle. In both Space Quest III and Space Quest V, the owners of the mail-order company dispatch Terminator-like androids to collect the huge debt incurred from the interest or kill him (but mostly kill him). What's strange about this is that the whistle is advertised as being free (and that ordering it in the first place is optional!).
• In Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, the villain Lucas locks people in a Saw-esque trap he calls "Happy Birthday." The puzzle requires you to light a candle and put it on a birthday cake with a bomb in it. However, the trap is that prior to that, you uncork a barrel full of fuel which soaks the room and catches fire when the cake explodes - locking the player into an inferno which kills them. The intended solution is for the player to watch a video created by a previous victim of the trap, allowing them to bypass the need to open the fuel barrel, so the cake doesn't set the room on fire. The problems with that: even though Ethan watches the video, he is still surprised when the cake explodes even though logically he should know it will. The room which has canonically already been set on fire (possibly multiple times) but is made of wood which bears no marks of this. And the video itself was being shot on a head-mounted camera which should have been destroyed in the same fire that killed the character wearing it.
• In Until Dawn: There are a lot.
  • In Chapter 10, Sam and Mike encounter a room containing "bodies... a lot of them" and start freaking out over the number of victims there — which, depending on the player's choices, can be as low as one person (who can't be saved anyhow).
  • After retrieving Josh in Chapter 10, Sam offers to climb out of the mine and go back to the lodge to meet up with "the others" — even if there are no others to meet up with, on account of everyone but Mike, Josh, and herself being dead by that point. While Matt's fate is uncertain to her, she has no reason to think he is at the lodge.
  • The fact that the police were never involved before the events of the game makes no sense. After the cave-in, where a dozen miners went cannibalistic on their colleagues and were brought to the sanatorium, most of them turned into wendigos and proceeded to massacre everyone. They killed all the staff and other patients in the sanatorium, and then traveled from the sanatorium to the hotel and killed everyone there. This hotel was for wealthy families on vacation — by all logic, a major public investigation should have began when 100 people were suddenly killed on a remote mountain. And yet, the game does not suggest that there was ever any actual investigation into why everyone in the sanatorium and hotel suddenly died. If the government had investigated, they would have discovered the dead bodies and wendigos and locked the whole mountain down forever. And if they hadn't investigated, that means the friends and families of the 100 people who died there did not say a single word about the sudden mass disappearance.
  • There is absolutely no way Josh could have done the pranks/scares that he did without help from someone else. His plan only tracks up until the first saw trap with him and Ashley chained up. After that, Chris and Ashley immediately go back to the lodge to find Sam, pausing for only a few minutes when they talk to Matt and Emily. According to the timestamps, however, over an hour passed after the first saw trap before Chris and Ashley return to the lodge. How is that possible? Did they just stand outside in the snow for an hour doing nothing, giving Josh ample time to sneak back into the lodge, set up balloons everywhere, and chase Sam into the basement? Not only that, but there is no point during the game where Josh could have snuck down to the cable car station to trash it (including painting "DIE" all over the walls) before Matt and Emily got there. That was just impossible for him to do alone, yet the game expects us to think he did.
  • Wendigo Hannah does not recognize Josh. The game makes that clear; she only spares him if he tries to communicate with her because Sam told him about Hannah's journal. Wendigos hunt at night, and we know from his intro video that Josh spent time in the cabin at night, so why did Hannah never eat Josh?
  • How did the search team not find Hannah? As established when Matt and Emily go there, the cliff where her and Beth fell is only a short walk away from the cable car station. The hole that they fell into is completely visible, even during a snowstorm in the middle of the night. When the search team couldn't find any trace of the twins on the mountain, wouldn't the very accessible mine be the obvious place to look? They're not particularly extensive, since most of the tunnels have been sealed off, and Hannah was crawling around down there the whole time. It just doesn't make sense that she was never found.
    • Moreover, why didn't The Stranger save Hannah? He saw where the twins fell, and he knows the mountain like the back of his hand. All he had to do was take an hour out of his day to go check and see if they're alive or not. If he's afraid they'll accuse him of something — which is unlikely, since Hannah and Beth clearly see him trying to save them in the prologue — all he has to do is prove that he was actually saving them from wendigos with the several wendigos he has imprisoned in the sanatorium. And if he assumes they're both dead, which would be incredibly naïve and stupid on his part, he would still go check, for the simple fact that he salvages body parts to use as wendigo bait.
  • Why are the dozen miner wendigos still wearing miner clothes? They were brought to the sanatorium and treated for weeks. They would obviously have been changed into patient clothes. And even if they weren't, wendigo Hannah's appearance clearly demonstrates that after just a year of being a wendigo, all of a person's clothes disappear. The miner wendigos have been wendigos for decades and their dirty, bloody mining clothes are still intact.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: Due to the timing of when Ganon reveals himself, the nature of his and Agahnim's identity is ambiguous. On one hand, Agahnim is trying to break the seal on Ganon in the Sacred Realm, but as Ganon reveals Agahnim to be his "alter ego", Ganon is apparently able to escape the Sacred Realm. This leads to two possibilities: 1. That Agahnim was possessed by Ganon with some power that could leak out of the Sacred Realm, or 2. That Agahnim is an alternate body created by Ganon that can escape the Sacred Realm but with limited power. Neither explanation is used in-game, but the comics and two mangas use the former explanation.
  • Hyrule Warriors: When we meet Midna for the first time in the original Legend Mode, she says that she hates Cia because Cia cursed her into her imp form. In Cia's storyline, however, we see that Midna is already in imp form when Cia first meets her.
• The end of The Witcher shows Geralt preventing the death of King Foltest of Temeria at the hands of an unknown witcher assassin. The start of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings shows a different witcher, Letho, assassinating King Demavend of Aedirn a few months later, then during the game he successfully takes out Foltest as well. The game's plot eventually reveals that Demavend's death was arranged by The Lodge of Sorceresses, but Letho then went rogue and carried out the second assassination at the behest of his real employer The Emperor of Nilfegaard. Word of God confirmed that the first assassin was one of Letho's fellow Viper School assassins but it makes no sense for them to attempt to kill Foltest first. Letho revlealed that the substantial assistance of The Lodge was invaluable whilst plotting to kill Demavend but that would have gone out of the window if his ulterior motives were revealed by the wrong king being murdered.
• The revelation that Girls' Frontline is a prequel to Codename Bakery Girl created some lore issues for the latter, as T-Dolls were conspicuously absent during the events of Bakery Girl and numerous T-Dolls in that game used firearms that were made after the collapse of the Soviet Union that supposedly never occurred in the original game, one of which even wears a Russian Federation flag patch on her shirt's left sleeve. The upcoming remake aims to rectify this by explaining that the Soviet Union was reformed before the events of Girls Frontline and revealing what happened to the T-Dolls.
• In Deathloop, Juliana notes that Colt never, in any loop, gives her the code to the tunnels he uses to sneak around the island. If she knew that code, she could go down there and intercept him early in the day, preventing him from breaking the loop. However, the tunnel code is only four digits and does not change between loops. Juliana, being one of the only two with memory that survives the day, could brute force the code. Once she does, it would never change.
• Starcraft:
  • In the manual of Starcraft, it is setup a fiveway conflict between the Terrans, Zerg and Protoss. The Zerg want to assimilate the Protoss, but need an army of psychic supersoldiers or they will lose hard. The Terrans were fighting each other for independence. The Zerg invade with the intent of conscripting the Terrans into their army of psychic soldiers. The Protoss want to stop the Zerg from achieving parity, so they start killing Terrans before some Protoss rebel out of conscience. The Zerg ultimately succeeded and sent a psychic army of infested Terrans to defeat the Protoss. Then the Dark Templar show up with a means to defeat the Zerg, but the Khalai distrust them. Due to gameplay limitations and a condensed script, the game itself could never realize this epic conflict. This left us with the enormous plot hole that the Zerg's search for psionic powers ultimately proved superfluous to the game's plot, as they are never brought into the equation when the swarm aims for the Protoss homeworld. The plot twist of Infested Kerrigan not only offered no apparent benefit to the Zerg, since she was left on Char and provided no bonus during the invasion of Aiur, but her ego got Zasz killed. The Protoss' psychic might offered no advantage against the overwhelming numbers of the Zerg swarms.
  • During Episode I, the Terran campaign, it is stated many times that the Protoss fleet led by high prelate Tassadar is recurrent in showing up whenever a Terran colony is infested by the Zerg swarm, in order to incinerate everything. This even leads to a direct battle in mission 9, when Mengsk orders Kerrigan to stop the Protoss force from attacking the Zerg storming Confederate forces on Tarsonis, and she also claims that she senses that the Protoss are there not just to stop the Zerg but to wipe out everyone (including the human population of the planet). However, during Episode III, one of the accusations of the Council against Tassadar before arresting him is that he refused to destroy the Terran colonies, sparing the humans. This would have been at least partially justified in a mission of the Terran campaign that was cut before release, "Biting the bullet". There, Tassadar decided to join forces with the Terrans against the Zerg.
  • The location of Aiur, the distant homeworld of the Protoss, is unknown until the Overmind discovers it by entering in contact with Zeratul's mind. Even then, the subsequent battle where the Overmind died is completely concealed to Terrans except for the ragtag Raynor's raiders who were assisting Tassadar (and who remained on Aiur and later Shakuras, standing with the Protoss refugees). Enters Brood War, and the United Earth Directorate is completely aware of what the Overmind is, that it died, and a new one was growing on Char. Even if it was monitoring the Terran colonies, certain details would not have been available to humans who did not go to Aiur.
• In the Pegasus Prime version of The Journeyman Project, the Big Bad alters the past and if you screw around instead of going to the TSA to advance the plot, the distortion wave uncreates Gage. After avoiding the distortion wave by traveling to the ancient past and then jumping back to the altered present, Gage's boss in the new timeline recognizes him, even though Gage shouldn't technically exist in the new timeline.
• The opening cutscene in Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness has Lara lashing out against Werner von Croy for leaving her behind in Egypt. However, the end of Tomb Raider Chronicles, which takes place before Angel of Darkness, shows von Croy searching for Lara and is estatic upon finding her discarded backpack.

Webcomics

• Life With Lamarr has Eli create the Free Children's Commune after the Black Mesa incident. However, in Dr. Breen's backstory, he was raised at the Free Children's Commune before becoming head of Black Mesa and causing the Black Mesa incident.
• In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, there was one that was fixed later. Chuck Goodrich had turned out to be a time traveller sent to stop a catastrophe threatening The End of the World as We Know It, and not only that, but it had happened multiple times, with each new timeline having another disaster that needed to be averted by sending Chuck back, resulting in a lot of Chucks arriving in the present time. King Radical also kept showing up to question them, because he knew from something that happened in the past that one of them was going to try (going to have tried?) to stop his Evil Plan. Then finally, the original Chuck half-accidentally travelled back in time and met King Radical what to Radical was the first time, and threatened to shoot him, which turned out to be what gave him the idea that Chuck was going to try to stop him. The plot hole was that his dialogue said that this version of him had already saved the world, and saving it from Radical was an extra save, so not what he was sent for. But this contradicted King Radical asking the Chucks in the present about what they had come to save the world from, in case it was him. However, the comic was subsequently edited to replace that line with something that wouldn't create a Plot Hole.

Lampshade Hanging

Anime & Manga

• Bleach: Anime Episode 134 has Yumichika, Rin and Hanatarou using a 12th division machine that manifests spirits as physical beings so even humans can see them to study the recent Arrancar attacks. This leads into the main plot of the episode, the ghost of a baker who wants his mother to taste one of his recipes before he can move on. Since he can't make a cake and he can't approach her about his desires because she can't see him, Yumichika, Rin and Hanatarou have to learn how to make the perfect cake and get his mother to taste it. The obvious issue here is that the machine they were using at the start of the episode meant they could have revealed the ghost to the mother right at the start, got her to make and taste the cake rendering the rest of the episode unnecessary. Lampshaded at the end of the episode during the next episode preview.
  Yumichika: So that soul-revealing device isn't just for you?
  Rin: Yes, it can materialise any nearby soul.
  Yumichika: So, if we had used it on him in the beginning, we wouldn't have had to work so hard.
  Rin: I see! Yumichika-san, you're so smart!
  Yumichika: Unbelievable!

Comedy

• In a stand-up special by Cedric The Entertainer from the early 2000's, he joked about the Y2K scare and how "ready" he was for the world to end at midnight, when he had a sudden realization:
  "If the world was gonna end at midnight on New Years Day, why would it happen in the Eastern Time Zone? Does God live in New York?"

Fan Works

• This parody of the original Battlestar Galactica contains this exchange between Captain Alpo (cough) and Lieutennant Startrek (cough cough):
  ALPO: Say, Carrion is hundreds of light-yarons [sic] away. How did you get back so quickly?
  STARTREK: The same way I got there. I went through a loophole in the plot!
• In the Sonic fanfiction Chao of the World, Unite!, plot holes are used so frequently they are a form of transportation.
  Maria: Boy, it's a good thing that severe decompression from that hole isn't causing the ship to buckle and explode, or that the air that's whooshing out isn't knocking us into the sun, or something.
  Amy: Why isn't it?
  Zombie (an OC): Plot hole.
• The Game Over series uses plot hole portals as an Interdimensional Travel Device, encased in shells that break on contact (and sometimes release on a timer) and fired out of a bazooka. The original versions dumped you somewhere in the universe you wanted to go (and thankfully, most of those places had breathable air), but later versions had fully controlled destinations. There are also Cool Gates that gave a framework for the portal to always appear in. SC also always has one on him to exit stage left.
• Pandora from the Pony POV Series is the Anthropomorphic Personification of imagination and has the ability to invoke plot holes as an attack. She does so to help Shining Armor against General-Admiral Makarov.
  Makarov: What did you do?!
  Pandora: Triggered a disaster for any story: Plot holes catching up!
• In I Must Be Going, an installment of the Skyhold Academy Yearbook series of Dragon Age fics, Varric rewrites The Princess Bride to star the members of the school's staff. (It Makes Sense in Context.) Near the end, when he finds himself struggling to resolve the plot, he literally opens a plot hole and sends the Inigo Montoya expy through it to retrieve the weapon the characters need. Bull's the one who lampshades the matter, when Varric reads the story out loud for everyone.
  Bull: [He] jumped into a plot hole? And everybody's okay with this?
• Ultra Fast Pony:
  • The second episode is titled "Fillin' Dem Plot Holes, Bro!" Twilight Sparkle spends the entire Previously on… montage explaining crucial backstory information that should have been in the previous episode, but wasn't. Even then, she fails to explain the Elements of Harmony, so when it comes time to use them she simply declares, "Vaguely established magical friend powers, activate! ... It's a plot hole. Deal with it!"
  • "Purple Party Pooper":
    Applejack: Wow, Twilight, you're looking awfully nice. Especially after the last episode, Celestia supposedly cut your horn off.
    Twilight: Really? You're complaining? You, out of everyone here, is complaining about continuity?
  • "For Glorious Mother Equestria!":
    Narrator: But then the next day, the dragon was suddenly big!
    Twilight: Whoa, whoa, hang on there a second. I think we maybe missed a teeny tiny little bit of all of the backstory.
    Caption: Nothing new here...

Films — Animation

• In The Emperor's New Groove, Kronk and Yzma get struck by lightning and fall into a gigantic pit during a chase scene and yet somehow beat the heroes to their destination. Both of them, when called on this, acknowledge that they have no way to explain how this happened, and Kronk even has a diagram of the enormous (plot) hole they fell into.

Live-Action TV

• The Community episode "Horrors in Seven Spooky Steps" examines this through the character of Genre Savvy Abed. To briefly summarize: each character is telling a Halloween story, and when it comes around to Abed, he expresses dissatisfaction with another character's story due to the unbelievable actions of its characters and the plot holes this created. However, Abed's own story becomes so bogged down in making sure that everything is explained, everything makes sense, everything the characters do is logically thought out and explained and that there are no plot holes whatsoever that he overlooks the fact that some of these plot holes are fundamental Acceptable Breaks from Reality for telling a horror story to begin with. All this means is that nothing happens in his story and all his listeners are bored and frustrated by it.
• Parodied in A Touch of Cloth: A throwaway line at the start of Series 2 reveals that a pound of heroin has been stolen from the vice squad tuck shop. Later on, when Jack goes undercover at Macratty's lair, it's revealed he took the pound of heroin to give to Macratty, to gain his trust. Later on, back at the station, Asap points out that for Jack to have taken the heroin violates the laws of continuity, since it went missing before he was even involved in the storyline; Jack angrily retorts that he doesn't follow rules, not even the rules of continuity... and just to prove his point, his Beard of Sorrow vanishes for the duration of his rant.
• Glee: This show was not known for its consistent plot, but one of the biggest recurring plot holes is its flexible sense of time and space. All the Ohio towns mentioned are real places, but none of them are very close to each other. Lima, where the show is set, is two hours away from both Akron (where arch-rivals Vocal Adrenaline are based) and Westerville (home of the Dalton Academy Warblers), making it a stretch that characters can casually drive between the locations like they're the next town over. And once the original kids graduate high school, most of them move out of state for college and other endeavors, and yet they all have the free time to fly back to Lima to make guest appearances whenever the plot calls for it. Sue finally lampshades this in the fifth season:
  "Don't you kids have jobs? You must have some kind of income to pay the team of scientists to run the teleporters you all seem to have because you keep coming back here!"
• The Goes Wrong Show: In the first episode "Spirit of Christmas" Robert, playing Santa, drunkenly remarks that the play doesn't make sense when noting that the sleigh is in the garden despite Santa and his elves having entered through the chimney. Interestingly the lampshading was a case of Real Life Writes the Plot: late into production they noticed the plot hole, and instead of completely rewriting the plot to fix it, they just have Robert mention how the play doesnt make sense. Justified in that this is the kind of sloppiness expected by the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society anyway.
• Played for laughs in Monty Python's Cycling Tour, where the protagonist was hauled before a firing squad three times for execution. The first two times, the firing squad misses the target. The third time the squad charges at the protagonist and tries to skewer him with their bayonets. A grey screen with the words "Scene Missing" then appears. The next scene shows the protagonist free outside the prison saying "What an amazing escape!"
• In MST3K's Crawling Eye episode, Joel and the bots discuss the titular monster, with Joel calling it a plot hole how none of the characters think of attacking the eye with salt or lemon juice, or how such a race could exists, and if it came to Earth, why would it land on the pointy tip of a mountain? Crow then says that they've probably thought more about the monster than the movie's creators have.
• In one episode of Stargate SG-1 a recruit spots a plot hole in a training exercise. A recruit is part of a bunch of recent Air Force graduates training for a role in the Stargate program. Part of a training exercise requires that they have no backup from SG-1 because SG-1 was caught in an ambush attack by a small number of Jaffa and called for backup; the recruit notes that SG-1 is too elite to be held down by a small number of Jaffa, and if it was an ambush attack, they wouldn't have had time to call in for backup. This is waved off, but out of earshot Sam remarks to Jack, "He's right, you know."

Video Games

• Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal: even if Imoen could die and be resurrected infinite times without becoming dust like all the Bhaalspawn, this is acknowledged in a dialogue with Sarevok]. Precisely Imoen says: "What... what was it like to die, Sarevok? Seeing as you've been through the experience repeatedly I can't help but wonder if you've developed some perspective on it." while Sarevok answers: "Do you intend for me to believe that a weakling such as yourself has never needed to be revived by a priest? Bah! I imagine this group has gained a discount at the temple of Helm for you, dear sister." and then Imoen: "Yeah, but that's different. That's just some blackness and it's like, 'Oops, here you go!'. I don't think I've ever been really, really dead like you have."
  • Can be incoherent in itself if she actually never died in your playthrough.
• In Alan Wake, Plot Holes form the villain's primary advantage. The Lake brings to life anything that an artist creates while inside it, but if that artist leaves an unexplained hole, the Darkness fills it in in the worst possible way. The previous writer before Wake simply wrote his wife back to life without any explanation, but the Darkness was happy to provide one.
• In the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided DLC "A Criminal Past", which is set 9 months prior to the main story, when Adam takes a pill that restores his augmentations, the game notes that giving him access to his experimental augs long before he knew about their presence in his body would constitute a continuity error. You are then given the option of respecting continuity in exchange for a weaker Adam or accepting the plot hole for more power.
• FreeSpace:
  • In the fanmade parody campaign "Deus Ex Machina", a plot hole is a physical entity that causes random impossible things to happen. The player gets caught in one early on, and the story just plain stops trying to make even a semblance of sense from there (not that it made a great deal of sense beforehand...)
  • In the same fashion in the "Ridiculous" campaign, a bunch of ships from different universes and time get caught in some plot hole dimension. Then it's a whole bunch of ridiculous (hence the name?) canon and non-canon stuff. Not to mention the This! Is! Sparta! part. Did I tell you about a ship measuring the "plot density" before entering the plot hole, and getting a negative result?
• In the The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy video game, Mandy asks Grim why he can touch the bad mojo balls and not go crazy, to which Grim replies, "I thought we agreed not to talk about the plot holes, Mandy."
• In Kingdom of Loathing, a plot hole is an item that damages enemies by making them fall into it, and is needed to defeat the best-selling novelist.

Web Animation

• Discussed in RWBY Chibi episode 12 during their play of "Little Red Riding Hood", Blake questions why Weiss, who is playing the Woodsman, is even needed if Ruby/Red is already an amazing combatant with an awesome weapon. Ruby can only muster that they're "BFFs".

Webcomics

• Bob and George gleefully lampshades its plot holes, at one point doing a literal Hand Wave. On at least one case it went back and filled a plot hole years after it was made. As an extension of the running joke "There are no plot holes", Bob and George's forums automatically replaced the words 'plot hole' with 'spoon', since There is no spoon.
• Okashina Okashi uses plot holes as a Plot Device, they are portals to other realities, each with it's own dominant Japanese Media Tropes.
• APT Comic uses these in a very literal way, you can access them by defying currently-existing canon (like the other plot hole definition) and pull stuff out at the cost of "Plothole Fairy Points."
• In Real Life Comics, a Plot Hole appears as a sort of space-time anomaly which functions as a portal into a blank dimension in which the protagonist has to resolve the current hole in the plot of the Story Arc before they can escape back into "reality". Thus far, the mechanism has only been used once. Said plot hole was eventually tricked into manifesting in a different dimension entirely, with tragic consequences.
• This strip of Badly Drawn Kitties explains a plot hole rather succinctly. In fact, you could say it explains all plot holes rather succinctly.
• This strip of The Wacky Adventures of Lunar and Kirk is the first of a series involving a literal hole in the world caused by a plot hole, which will swallow and destroy anyone or anything that enters it.
• The ship in I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space!!! veers dangerously near to a Plot Hole, before they are saved by a hasty (offpage) explanation.
• Acrobat has a villain called Plot Hole, Arch-Enemy of Plot Twist. He keeps coming back, after getting killed multiple times, without any explanation and believes that Plot Twist created him
  Plot Hole: That's what plot twist does! Creates plot holes!
• Gleefully parodied by Goblins: Life Through Their Eyes, in the Tempts Fate 9 bonus strip. Tempts fights an ancient dragon, the speaking of whose name will cause him to be sucked into a Plot Hole and vanish forever.
• An old David Herbert comic Golden Gamers used to frequently use plot holes as one of the abilities of the main characters.
• Plot holes appear in the quite literal sense in The Way of the Metagamer.
• Ansem Retort not only handwaved the "Yuffie got killed in Season 1" hole, but pointed out that recurring characters include Darth Maul and Jesus, so any minor plot hole pretty much means nothing.
• Homestuck lampshades this here.
• In Knights of Buena Vista, the author confesses that strip #11 started with a couple of lines just to fill in a plot hole.
• In El Goonish Shive, the rant of this strip lampshades a retroactive plot hole involving the existence of Magic Pants which are revealed in a future strip. Dan goes on to say that hopes that by the time he gets to the point of adding the rant for that future strip he'll be able to Hand Wave it.
• Drowtales has a non-canon sidestory with a character literally named Plothole, who originates from an earlier (also non-canon) story where Naal'suul is cured of her Demonic Possession and it splits off into a separate individual, something that is explicitly impossible in the main universe and only allowed because, again, it's non-canon. And yet in the second story this version of Naal is still tainted, making her double doubly paradoxical. One character thinks to herself that she could destroy the universe and Naal spends the entire time they're on page together reminding Plothole that she doesn't exist and/or beating her up.

Web Original

• The Protectors of the Plot Continuum actually harness plot holes to make their technology work, such as portal devices or inter-universe communicators.
• A similar idea, except exclusively used with "Plothole Generators" in the Anti-Cliché and Mary-Sue Elimination Society. All other gadgets in the Society operate exclusively on Applied Phlebotinum.
• Minor character Zhu Bao literally falls into one in Farce of the Three Kingdoms.

Web Videos

• A literal plot hole is featured in To Boldly Flee, as explained by Dr. Insano. In the end, The Nostalgia Critic absorbs the Plot Hole and becomes one with the universe.
• In the Third Rate Gamer's Chip n' Dale review, Cool Spot shows up the way he usually did in TRG's review of said game, but Billy quickly calls him out on this since Cool Spot was supposed to be dead. TRG responds with "Who's going to notice?" This is a stab at the same plot hole with Kool-Aid Man in The Irate Gamer's review of Cool Spot.
• My Little Pony in a Nutshell has an outright field day with Growing Up Is Hard To Do, pointing out no less than three major plot holes in the episode where the ponies are suddenly unable to do something they or other young characters had no problem doing in previous episodes. Each and every time a character will say they can't do something because they're young, Aple Blom will try and point out a previous episode where they could, and be cut off mid-sentence.
  But didn't we know how to use the train in Season 9 Episode 12?
  Didn't we create maps ourselves in Season 6 Episode 19 and Season 1 Episode 18?
  Didn't Applejack and Bab Seed travel across Equestria when they were young in season 1 episode 23 and season 3 episode 4?

Western Animation

• Tiny Toons:
  • In The Movie How I Spent My Vacation, Buster and Babs fall into a literal "plot hole"—taking the form of a hole in the ground with a trippy dimension inside—which abruptly returns them to Acme Acres just in time for the end of the movie. Babs remarks, "I was wondering how those hack writers were going to wrap this up."
  • Lampshaded again in a travel episode, where a set of luggage is devoured by Dizzy Devil, but reappears later. Babs pronounces it, "A plot hole big enough to drive a Mack truck through!"
• In The Penguins of Madagascar episode "Otter Gone Wild", a feral Marlene is captured by a giant cage falling out of nowhere. King Julien asks where the cage came from. Kowalski replies that that's classified information.
• One episode of Ed, Edd n Eddy has the three searching for a television to watch a monster movie marathon on after Sarah kicks them out of Ed's place. At one point, Edd asks why they don't just watch it at his or Eddy's house.
  Eddy: What? And ruin the plot?
• In Frisky Dingo:
  • Phil says that the Annihilatrix is up and running, to which Killface is baffled because they made it clear that it was sold for scrap. But that fine because Ret-Con Construction bought all of the pieces back and rebuilt it.
  • Another thing that was weird is why Killface does not murder Phil, given that we routinely see Killface murder people who annoy him over petty thinks and here Phil is doing far worse. This was confusing, but accepted as some bizzare part of Killface's gentlemanly demeanor. This is broken in the last episode with Phil where Killface does try, and fails, to kill Phil.
• Family Guy:
  • In "Go Stewie Go", Stewie crossdresses to get a role on a childrens' show, falls for a female co-star, and reveals himself on a live broadcast. Afterwards, Brian asks why on Earth they would do a live broadcast of a kids' show, and Stewie tells him "You really don't want to pull the thread on this one".
  • In "The Former Life of Brian", Brian discovers he has a 13-year-old son. Stewie asks him how that's possible, considering he's only 7, causing Brian to attempt to handwave it aside by claiming that he's older in dog years. Stewie rightly points out that it doesn't work like that, so Brian just tells him that if he doesn't like it, he can go and bitch about it on the internet!
• Transformers:
  • The Unicron Singularity, introduced in the Unicron Trilogy, is a massive continuity-damaging presence created by the world-destroying Unicron. It is also canonically stated to be the cause of every inconsistency and plot hole that was and will be created in the Transformers multiverse, at least until Shockwave in the IDW Comics continuity used a reality-breaking weapon that ended the Singularity by forcing each Unicron in every Transformers continuity to become a separate entity.
  • It's simultaneously the cause of and solution to every plot hole ever in Transformers - past, present, or future. It's best not to think about how that works. It's probably a case of "Break it I did. Fix it I shall".
• How Fry finally manages to defeat the Brainspawn (and fulfill the destiny the Niblonians arranged for him) in the Futurama episode "The Day The Earth Stood Stupid": He trapped the Master Brain in a book he wrote, "a crummy world of plot holes and spelling mistakes!"
• In Night of the Living Doo, an Affectionate Parody of The New Scooby Doo Movies and its frequent guest stars, Gary Coleman complains at all of the inconsistencies that have occurred in the special. He wants to know why he's still a zombie even when they were proven fake; why Shifty, who was actually Mark Hamill, dressed up as a zombie when the culprit was someone completely different; and who the Mummy was.
• In the Adventure Time episode "The Prince Who Wanted Everything", Cake notices that Lumpy Space Prince somehow knows Fionna's name despite never meeting her before. Justified since the episode is a crappy fanfiction written by Lumpy Space Princess.