The Doctor's post from my earlier thread 'how do wizards make toast?' pointing it as a great plot hole inspires this thread.

A couple of the plot holes already known:

Toast in Hogwarts! (although this has been disputed by possible toast making spells or just plain old fire)
Colin's camera (admitted by JK Rowling)


I'm pretty sure there's thousands others but that would take time and research. Time that i'm about to dedicate to sleep.

 

The mechanics of the Fidelius charm.

Why Hagrid tell Harry in PS that all the dark wizards around graduated from Slytherin, when he clearly knew all about about Sirius?

EDIT: What was the plot hole wth the camera?

 

Greyback gets through the Dark Mark barrier in book 6 to go up the stairs to kill Dumbledore. In book 7, he says he has no Dark Mark.

Moody, Dumbledore and the Marauder's Map being able to detect Harry under the dues ex machina super whamodyne invisibility cloak.

 

Old cameras didn't have any electrical workings in them, so they'd work.

 

Harry gets not one piece of mail from the wizarding world when he was growing up at the Dursley's. He should have been getting loads of fan mail every day like Lockhart.

We can attribute this to mail wards from Dumbledore, but Harry doesn't even get fan mail when he enters the wizarding world and attends Hogwarts. I think he might have gotten a few pieces of mail during GoF or OOTP (can't remember), but he should have been getting endorsement offers, marriage proposals, straight up fan mail from girls like Ginny, "thank you" letters from adult wizards, hate mail from Death Eaters or pureblood sympathizers, etc the moment he started his first year at Hogwarts.

 

....Not really a plot hole in my opinion, but Voldemort claiming that James died straight backed and proud. Then in DH we find he was killed running into the foyer without his wand.....It bugged the shit out of me >__>

 

Not a bad idea to make a list but I think we should rate the plot holes on a scale from one to ten, depending on how good and believable we can explain it away by adding small things that weren't mentioned in canon or twisting it just a bit.

For example:

Toast at Hogwarts
Hole deepness: 1 feet - It could be pan-grilled, there could be a charm etc.

Another one:

Ron speaking Parseltongue in DH
Hole deepness: 6 feet at least. That's a deep one because why would it be so special to be born with something even a redhaired troll can learn? And if you can learn it, it would've been mentioned more often. Every Care of magical creatures teacher should be able to do it.
There are, however, possibilities to explain it away, for example by adding a magical component to it.

 

James coming out before Lily at the Priori Incantum sequence in GoF, when it's been repeatedly shown that Lily died after James. I thought it was a clever way to hint at a deeper mystery surrounding the fall of Voldemort; it turned out to just be a major fuck-up on Rowling's part. In fact, where's the AK that Voldemort fired at baby Harry?

Hell, for that matter, are you saying that wand wasn't used at all during that stretch of time besides firing off AKs? There ought to have been a few Crucios or Imperios thrown in, maybe a self-pleasuring charm for the lulz.

 

I think that is not a plot hole, just Voldemort boasting. It's much more legitimate ot kill someone in combat, rather than cursing them in back.

 

I disagree. In fact, considering the fact that JKR had to invent a self changing floor plan because she could not remember on which floor various rooms where on, I can say that she has a horrible memory when it comes to her own work. I get a feeling Lord Voldemort respected James Potter, who was probably a better opponent than Harry was, unless he was blessed with the same amount of luck and deus-ex machinas.

She probably forgot the tiny little detail after she wrote it.

 

Do we count the stupidly complicated GOF kidnapping plot as a plot hole or just stupidity? Just throw Harry a damn shoe thats a portkey and see him pop away.

 

Hole: "How do people know Harry survived Godric's Hollow?" For all intensive purposes, the only ones who knew he was being transferred away were Hagrid, Sirius, Dumbledore, and McGonagall. Given that one is jailed, two are loyal to Dumbledore, and the other is the man himself, I doubt the secret got out.

Portkeys get in and out of Hogwarts (Note: Triwizard cup, Dumbledore's own centaur-head), yet Deatheaters physically flee from Hogwarts, on a ground level.

How do the public know Harry has a scar? Only the aforementioned four have ever seen it prior to his entrance in the Wizarding World.

 

I can honestly same I'm proud of being a nitpicker. It's not relevant to the plot, and I would only rate it a 2 or 3 on a scale of 10, but it is a plot hole. And no, I don't want to read whole chapters about Harry reading fan mail. I would liked to have seen JKR insert a sentence or two about it though. Something like how Harry was tired of being swarmed by owls in the morning, or how he had to ask Dumbledore to prevent fanmail from reaching him due to the staggering amount received, and the fact that it was impossible for him to respond to even a third of it. Just a sentence or two. I'm not asking for a full blown explanation, just a short mention in one of the earlier books would have been nice. Jesus fucking Christ you need to calm the fuck down with that shit.

I second the overly complicated trap laid for Harry in GoF. Moody could have pulled Harry aside at any time during the year and had him take ahold of a portkey.

The pidgin parseltongue is annoying as hell.

 

Not a plot hole really is it? Surely a plot hole is an inconsitancy in the plot and not bits you think should happen. That would be like saying Harry only had one bath in 7 years is a plot hole. It is an irrelevant piece of information that Harry washes, as much as him getting fan mail.


There is an old thread which deals with a lot of these issues pre-DH

http://forums.darklordpotter.net/showthread.php?t=2430

 

Enh - it /is/ a plot hole as it's never even mentioned, but it's just annoying not a big deal.

How does a society run on 40 graduates a year, that makes no fucking sense and other schools aren't even mentioned so don't bother.

A plot hole...sort of is how Harry gets defense texts but he learns 0 new spells.

 

Only in the American book. The publishers apparently told her to change it to James coming out first, fuck knows why she listened but she did.

Eventually she caught on and re-wrote it again with Lily coming out first.
(My copy of GoF (english) has Lily coming out first)


Now to the point of this thread.
Wormtail and Maruders Map is just one big plot hole.

 

How about she said in an interview I think that there are only something like 5-10,000 wizards in the UK but in GoF the World Cup Stadium can hold 100,000 people. I don't know if that would really count as a plot hole as it came in an interview but still.

I won't even go into the whole underage magic tracking thing.

 

World Cup. Wizards from all over the world went to the game. I think Harry even mentioned seeing witches and wizards from other countries.

 

Harry is one ignorant person. During Gof at the world cup, he realizes for the first time that there are other schools besides Hogwarts. It's his first time that he realizes that there is a wizarding world outside Britian.

With this information we can conclude that Harry knows jack-shit about the world outside of Britian. Therefore, we have no idea of how big the wizarding world really is, and the population of its inhabitants.

Hell, it might not even be limited to the planet. Advanced bubblehead, shield charms, and apparation spells can take you away from Earth and to the wonders of outer space.