Shadsie
Sage of Tales
If you enjoy fiction - books, movies, television shows, animes, games, etc. and you've been an audience to many fictions, you've met Our Friend, the Plot Hole.
Some plot holes are tiny and easily mended with a little bit of reader or viewer imagination. Occasionally (very occasionally) an author might actually thank his or her fans for finding what they and their editor did not (didn't J.K. Rowling thank her fans for finding something amiss in one of the Harry Potter books? - It was just a tiny, nitpicking thing one cannot blame the writer of a massive series for overlooking by mistake)...
And then there are those you can hole-in-one a Death Star through. These are the ones that seem so obvious, so common-sense that the creators / characters not even attempting to explain them just will drive one nuts.
I have a specific pet-peeve plot hole that shows up in multiple media: THE APOCALYPSE IS HAPPENING ALL AROUND US but the lights are on, the water's running and the trains are running on time.
It annoys the poo out of me! I guess some people don't want too much squalor to distract from the exicting story about zombies and/or war or whatever, but there is just a part of my brain that says that if mankind has fallen, there shouldn't be an infrastructure.
I was reminded of it today when reading a certain blog that lays into a particular book series-that-shall-not-be-named that I'm actively ashamed of having read some of. It's been many years since I read it, but there was one part of one book highlighted today / in the recent post that showed main characters living and thinking quite casually even though the major city they'd been in had just been nuked that week. This is actually a recurring lack of common sense through the book series: Horrible things are happening, yet there are roads to travel, airports to land in that *should not exist after a nuclear boming raid,* technology is working, main characters are not much worried about the death going on around them because they're absorbed in themselves, whole passages are dedicated to how ugly someone's borrowed car is while the deaths of millions are given a sentence or two. People might know what books I'm talking about... Anyway, annoying main characters aside, the utter-mundane of their world where *things still work that should not be* that is a *jarring* juxtaposition to what is *supposed* to be happening...
Theroies from the anti-fans of the series that they might be a hallucinated-by-the-main-characters thing make it make a lot more sense. Being reminded led me to be reminded of another piece of fiction where I found this prominent...
"Zombieland" is actually a pretty fun movie. I enjoyed it. Horror/humor and geekiness - also a cross-country survival-fantasy... However, it is noted at several points that "The Virus" has been ravaging the world for a number of *weeks* - as in, it didn't just get started *weeks* ago, it actually has taken over and destroyed most people as of *weeks* ago. MOST of the human race is made up of zombies or has become food for them. The survivors the story follows, however, find *everything* working. Grocery stores have their lights on. When they visit a certain surviving celebrity's house, it makes sense that he'd have generators, but, honestly, the grocery stores and the amusement park I just can't see getting a power-feed for that long. (Even generators run on gas). Being a "near-future" situation rather than far-future, I doubt most of the shops and homes are running on solar power or are hooked up to wind-turbines. (if "Life After People" is any indicator, even hydroelectric power isn't going to last more than a few days because living humans with working minds are required to keep the power from surging and things genreally regulated at the dams and plants). Anyway, it did sap my enjoyment just a bit when I was mentally screaming "WHY IS EVERYTHING STILL ON?"
There are places where this is justifiable. In one of my short stories, the disapperance of all the people in a city (and apparently the world) while the lights and water were still on were a Twilight Zone-style weirdness-tipoff. The protagonist noted it. "Majora's Mask" has everything working during the apocalypse - not only is it video game and games tend to take leaps of logic so the player can do fun stuff - it's justifyable in that the plot is a "Just Before The End" thing. People are oblivious or in deinal and defying what is coming by keeping everything running.
For the most part, however, if you're crafting an end of the world style story, please do your research and don't just assume that the world will keep turning for your protagonists just because they're the heroes.
That's my recurrent pet peeve plot hole. What are yours?
Some plot holes are tiny and easily mended with a little bit of reader or viewer imagination. Occasionally (very occasionally) an author might actually thank his or her fans for finding what they and their editor did not (didn't J.K. Rowling thank her fans for finding something amiss in one of the Harry Potter books? - It was just a tiny, nitpicking thing one cannot blame the writer of a massive series for overlooking by mistake)...
And then there are those you can hole-in-one a Death Star through. These are the ones that seem so obvious, so common-sense that the creators / characters not even attempting to explain them just will drive one nuts.
I have a specific pet-peeve plot hole that shows up in multiple media: THE APOCALYPSE IS HAPPENING ALL AROUND US but the lights are on, the water's running and the trains are running on time.
It annoys the poo out of me! I guess some people don't want too much squalor to distract from the exicting story about zombies and/or war or whatever, but there is just a part of my brain that says that if mankind has fallen, there shouldn't be an infrastructure.
I was reminded of it today when reading a certain blog that lays into a particular book series-that-shall-not-be-named that I'm actively ashamed of having read some of. It's been many years since I read it, but there was one part of one book highlighted today / in the recent post that showed main characters living and thinking quite casually even though the major city they'd been in had just been nuked that week. This is actually a recurring lack of common sense through the book series: Horrible things are happening, yet there are roads to travel, airports to land in that *should not exist after a nuclear boming raid,* technology is working, main characters are not much worried about the death going on around them because they're absorbed in themselves, whole passages are dedicated to how ugly someone's borrowed car is while the deaths of millions are given a sentence or two. People might know what books I'm talking about... Anyway, annoying main characters aside, the utter-mundane of their world where *things still work that should not be* that is a *jarring* juxtaposition to what is *supposed* to be happening...
Theroies from the anti-fans of the series that they might be a hallucinated-by-the-main-characters thing make it make a lot more sense. Being reminded led me to be reminded of another piece of fiction where I found this prominent...
"Zombieland" is actually a pretty fun movie. I enjoyed it. Horror/humor and geekiness - also a cross-country survival-fantasy... However, it is noted at several points that "The Virus" has been ravaging the world for a number of *weeks* - as in, it didn't just get started *weeks* ago, it actually has taken over and destroyed most people as of *weeks* ago. MOST of the human race is made up of zombies or has become food for them. The survivors the story follows, however, find *everything* working. Grocery stores have their lights on. When they visit a certain surviving celebrity's house, it makes sense that he'd have generators, but, honestly, the grocery stores and the amusement park I just can't see getting a power-feed for that long. (Even generators run on gas). Being a "near-future" situation rather than far-future, I doubt most of the shops and homes are running on solar power or are hooked up to wind-turbines. (if "Life After People" is any indicator, even hydroelectric power isn't going to last more than a few days because living humans with working minds are required to keep the power from surging and things genreally regulated at the dams and plants). Anyway, it did sap my enjoyment just a bit when I was mentally screaming "WHY IS EVERYTHING STILL ON?"
There are places where this is justifiable. In one of my short stories, the disapperance of all the people in a city (and apparently the world) while the lights and water were still on were a Twilight Zone-style weirdness-tipoff. The protagonist noted it. "Majora's Mask" has everything working during the apocalypse - not only is it video game and games tend to take leaps of logic so the player can do fun stuff - it's justifyable in that the plot is a "Just Before The End" thing. People are oblivious or in deinal and defying what is coming by keeping everything running.
For the most part, however, if you're crafting an end of the world style story, please do your research and don't just assume that the world will keep turning for your protagonists just because they're the heroes.
That's my recurrent pet peeve plot hole. What are yours?