Stephen Kings The Dead Zone has a complex plot (clairvoyant tries to stop some future event from happening and ends up playing a part in how it unfolds) but it all makes perfect sense.
Whenever someone complains about “plot holes,” generally they are showing that they don’t know how to interact with a fictitious work.
The reader has to accept that characters aren’t always going to make the same choices they make or act how they act.
Also, no piece of fiction is going to show everything that happens in the story. They have to leave stuff out for time management/ brevity reasons. So the author has 2 options: either have plot points explained via dialogue or voice over. Or let the watcher/reader figure out what happened.
The problem with the latter is that audiences have been conditioned to have EVERYTHING spelled out, so when it isn’t they freak out.
Every plot strand from The Dark Knight fits together perfectly at the end.
Thank you very much for that link. I’m currently re-listening to the audiobooks in anticipation of the third volume, and look forward to reading this as an accompaniment.
Alfred Hitchcock rarely left any loose ends in his movies
I doubt there’s any major work of fiction that actually has a plot hole.* What you see are trivial peripheral elements that have nothing to do with the plot but weren’t specifically spelled out. For instance, people have asked Hitchcock why his characters don’t go to the police. His one-liner is a great one (“Because that would be dull.”), but generally in his films the people don’t go to the police because they’d be immediately arrested with no chance to clear their name.
Other times, plot holes are things that are perfectly clear within the movie, but are missed by the person mentioned them.
*Maybe The Big Sleep.
I agree. I enjoy Breaking Bad a lot, but the plots don’t stand any close scrutiny.
Finnegans Wake.
Go ahead- prove me wrong.
You’re welcome. I love reading what other people discover in text. My favorite thing from that sequence of posts is the discussion of the song that Kvothe’s father made up about his mother, and why the song made his mother so angry.
That was one of the most epic threads in the forum’s entire history. I’m pleased and proud to have been able to chip in a few cents’ worth. 
Is the question here whether there are any major works of fiction truly without plot holes, or whether there are any major works of fiction that everyone will agree are without plot holes? Because I’d say the answer to the former is “yes” while the latter is “probably not”. There are certainly plenty of works that contain plot holes, but a lot of things I’ve seen described as plot holes by posters here or elsewhere on the Internet are really just things that person considered unlikely or didn’t understand properly. Excluding stories for small children, there can’t be many works of fiction so simple and straightforward that there’s no way anyone could miss anything or get confused.
It isn’t a plot hole or even irrational for the Dursleys to not want Harry Potter to go to Hogwarts, because the first line of the first book and pretty much every other scene in which the Dursleys appear throughout the series makes it clear that they don’t like anything that isn’t “normal”. Magic isn’t normal, and they consider it to be weird and scary. They’re not wrong, either. Although they are horrible people, the Dursleys are correct in that Harry’s use of magic and association with other magic users leads to a number of situations that are at best socially embarrassing for them and at worst actually dangerous.
I remember another thread where a poster was bothered by The Sixth Sense because there’s a ghost who doesn’t realize he’s a ghost. But the only living character in the movie who can communicate with ghosts explicitly says that ghosts do not know that they’re dead. That’s one of the “rules” for how things work in this movie. It’s a plot hole when the established rules in a work of fiction aren’t consistently applied, not when they are. If the story is supposed to be realistic but the rules (although internally consistent) aren’t consistent with the real world then that’s a factual error rather than a plot hole. But when it comes to rules for things like ghosts and magic then you either have to suspend your disbelief and accept the rules of the story or stick to more realistic fiction.
Have you read the whole story? Do you understand that the Japanese had an actual reason for attacking Oahu? Do you also realize that Hawaii was a territory at the time, not literally “American soil”? History is an elaborate story, if you study it in detail, it has a perverse kind of logic to it. We tend to be fed the condensed, biased version.
When I first saw the four-dimensional CUBIC NON-ACADEMIC ASSHOLE EDUCATED STUPID DAY, I knew immediately that Joyce had missed a major detail. It’s like that time I woke up at six AM with no alarm: remember that bird that was singing outside the window that morning? Yeah, it was the day after meridian time personnel met in Washington to change Earth time. First words said was that only 1 day could be used on Earth to not change the 1 day bible. I was so pissed off by that. I really can’t even begin to describe the kind of anger I felt that day–have you ever been climbing a tree and your father all of a sudden came out and shouted at you to come clean your room, scaring the shit out of you and almost causing you to fall out? How mad would you have been then? It was kind of like that, squared. So then I could not give you false hope, no, on this strange and mournful day–the mother and child reunion is only a motion away. I tried singing that once, to my dirty lying teachers who use only the midnight to midnight 1 day (ignoring 3 other days) Time to not foul (already wrong) bible time. Lie that corrupts earth you educated stupid fools.
So yeah, that’s a BIG one right there.
You’ve only mentioned works of fantasy or science fiction in the OP. These by their nature tend to have extraordinary events and exceptional occurrences. In popular fiction, charged up emotional events and surprises tend to be more important than carefully constructed logical plots. So it’s likely that most popular fiction (best sellers, movies, TV shows) will show some omissions.
More serious literature and naturalistic films are much less likely to show these kinds of inconsistencies. I think the majority of works of fiction probably don’t actually have significant plot holes.
Your last line doesn’t follow from your argument. Popular fiction is probably the majority of works of fiction. While fiction set in a contemporary setting is less likely to have plot holes (for reasons of familiarity of setting to both creators and audience) and serious fiction is less likely to have plot holes (I think it’s because the authors take ‘serious fiction’ more seriously - rather than for the reason you mentioned in the first paragraph above - emotional reaction being more important than careful plot construction - there is at least one type of popular fiction that emphasizes logical plot construction over emotional reaction, and there are also plenty of serious fictions that ignore logical plot construction or emphasize emotional reaction) - that does not in any way argue that the majority of works are serious and naturalistic 