"Plot hole" has become the default term for anything in a story someone did not like. It gets applied to unanswered questions, to characters making poor decisions, to details the viewer missed, and to endings people disagree with.
That is a shame, because it is a genuinely useful term and it describes something specific. Spending it on everything leaves us without a word for the actual thing.
What a plot hole actually is
A plot hole is an internal contradiction. The story asserts something, then asserts something incompatible with it, and both cannot be true.
If a power is established as requiring physical contact and is later used across a room with no explanation, that is a plot hole. The story has broken a rule it set. The test is simple: can you point at two things in the work that cannot both be true? If not, it is something else.
Four things that are not plot holes
Almost every accusation falls into one of these instead:
- Unexplained is not contradictory. A story choosing not to explain how something works is a decision about focus, not an error. Most fiction leaves most things unexplained
- A character making a bad decision is characterisation. People act against their own interests constantly. The question is whether it is consistent with who they have been shown to be — and if it is not, the word you want is "out of character"
- Something you missed is not a hole. A surprising amount of this evaporates on rewatch, and it is worth checking before posting
- A choice you disliked is not a hole. An ending can be unsatisfying, unearned or tonally wrong without containing a single contradiction
Why the precision is worth having
Partly because the accusation is very easy to refute when it is wrong, and being wrong loudly costs you the argument. Someone produces the line of dialogue that explains the thing, and everything else you said gets discarded along with it.
But mostly because the more precise complaint is a better complaint. "This was never explained and the story acted like it had been" is sharper than "plot hole", identifies what actually bothered you, and cannot be answered by a single citation. It is also much harder to dismiss.
The version worth posting
Name the two things that conflict, and where each of them happens. If you cannot name two, you are describing something else — say what that is instead. Unearned, unexplained, inconsistent characterisation, rushed, and unsatisfying are all real criticisms, and all of them are more specific than the word most people reach for.
This matters more here than most places. A matchup argument that rests on a rule the series broke is only as strong as your ability to show the break.