This was meant to be a question solely pertaining to my story, but then I realized it involves another issue that encompasses many other works of fiction.
I’m envisioning a world of islands where sea monsters are a common threat: from savage amphibious folk who drag people from the shore into the depths to colossal kraken capable of swallowing a ship whole. It’s also a modern setting, meaning airplanes are a common means of transportation, but putting them in this world would make them the naturally more preferred method, negating the conflict that I want my characters to confront. If I wanted my story to revolve around, say, the crew of a ship, how would I justify that? Why would anyone still want to travel by boat through a sea infested with monsters when they could easily hitch a ride onto a plane instead? What factors would I put in this world to make travel by boat remain somewhat viable?
That question made me realize something: this is no different from the perpetually echoing “Why didn’t the Fellowship fly the eagles to Mordor?” I see similar problems come up in stories all the time, so much so that TV Tropes refers to this as a case of “Just Eat Gilligan,” in which a plot hole—justified or not—is allowed to persist because solving it would remove stakes or undermine the plot. But is that always a bad thing?
This trope is commonplace, but that doesn’t ruin many of the stories that have it or make them less enjoyable for me. The rules of my world and the choices my characters make still have to make sense, but is answering every single plot hole necessary? Do I still have to answer why my sailors don’t just fly, instead?
Terk
Hey Terk, great to hear from you again!
To answer your more general question first: Yes, having a big ol’ “why didn’t they take the eagles” plot hole is pretty much always a bad thing. Plot holes are annoying. They require the audience to ignore what the story is telling them and pretend it’s telling them something else. Some people are bothered more than others, but no one is bothered by the lack of a plot hole.
Of course, many popular stories still have plot holes, in the same way that many nice houses still have a draft coming in through incomplete insulation. If the story is good enough in other ways, audiences will tolerate a few plot holes, or any other mistake for that matter. And because the rest of the story is good, fans will often do mental gymnastics to claim that the mistake was actually good as well, which is where we get this idea that mistakes don’t matter.
So if the rest of your story is good enough, sure, you might be able to get away with leaving in this question of why the characters don’t just take a plane. But even in such a scenario, people will like your story more without that issue. And in your particular case, the plot hole is probably much more obvious than Tolkien’s eagles. In Middle-earth, giant eagles are rare and mysterious creatures, so readers probably aren’t thinking of them except when the story shoves them in our face. If your world has modern tech, airplanes will be a common fact of life, making them much harder to ignore. It’ll be like your heroes needing to get across the city, and choosing to walk for five hours instead of driving the car parked in front of their house.
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to show why your heroes are taking a boat, depending on the specifics of your world.
- If you turn back the technological clock a little, aircraft could still be short ranged and unreliable, making boats the only option.
- It was only in the 50s and 60s that planes cemented themselves as the best way to get around.
- There could be sky monsters too!
- Perhaps aircraft can only fly safely in specific zones that have been cleared of monsters, and your heroes have to go outside that area.
- Or maybe air travel is expensive because of all the fighter escorts that passenger planes need, so less wealthy travelers have no choice but to go by sea.
- It might be impossible to take the cargo by air.
- Planes can only carry so much, even modern ones. So if your ship is transporting something really heavy, a ship might still be the best option.
- Though you’ll have to think about this one a lot, since specially designed planes can carry quite a lot, and that’s in a world without sea monsters.
You can probably think of other ideas, knowing the setting better than I do, but that hopefully shows you what’s necessary.
On a final note, I’d recommend taking another look at the “savage amphibious folk.” It’s very easy for that kind of creature to run into the trope of an inherently evil human-like species, which gets ugly fast. Aquatic species can get there especially fast because they invoke the specter of Lovecraft and all his bigotry. I haven’t read your story so I can’t say for sure what’s going on with these watery guys, but it might be better to replace them with something non-sapient.
Hope that answers your question, and good luck with your story!
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One other option to “force” the characters to travel by sea is that cargo may get damaged with a change of pressure. Some high-end tech products may be susceptible to this, but also some more common goods, like wine, age differently (not always good nor bad) in low pressures.
For air travel, there’s also the need of a landing site: if your characters want to reach a remote and savage island where choppers cannot land easily (to say so), it may be a little easier to get there by sea.
And there’s also to consider the main goal of the travel. If it is a scientific expedition to study a certain aspect of algae, an animal species or magnetic fields, it’s better to go on a well-equipped ship than a plane.
Since sea travel, as complicated it may be, is definitely possible (otherwise, your story may not work), even if it is far more expensive because of all the counter-measures you need to include, it may be the only option for several reasons. You just need to find which one is better suited for the plot.
As someone who worked in logistics once, I would suggest another reason for taking a ship: the ship is actually a freighter, not meant for passeners.
Even today, with all the planes flying around, a large amount of transport is done by ship – it’s cheaper and much more viable for products which don’t need to be transported quickly. Space on a plane is much more limited and so is weight, so putting a hunge number of containment units on a ship and letting it, for instance, do the trip from China to Germany (that’s the route I’m most familiar with, but there are oodles of others) in about a month is still a viable solution.
That is why all the wheat is still stuck in the Ukraine right now while it should be spread across other countries. Ships have an enormous capacity today and can transport a lot of stuff all at once. The try to relocated the wheat to trains, for instance, can only move a fraction of what is waiting at the harbours. If the ships had gone out, much more would have been transported at once.
If your economy is large enough to demand the movement of large quantities of wares in one go, you can justify ships – perhaps with specific security features to ward off krakens and suchlike – traversing the oceans. Those need crews, so your main characters can be travelling by ship.
This freighter angle seems best to me. If I recall the statistic correctly, 80% of all cargo movement today is currently done by sea since the advent of the shipping container and globalized economies. Bulk commodities are not practical to move by air.
Another solution I’m surprised no one has mentioned is providing your world with reliably bad flying weather, or perhaps altering the density of your atmosphere. Thinning the air makes planes harder to get off the ground, which could set back the technological progress of aircraft as well as make travel by them more exclusive.
Maybe the sea is not so dangerous that every boat that goes out is all but guaranteed to sink. It’s rare enough not to worry too much about it
Maybe they know these creatures are out there, but their ship has countermeasures. For some reason, this time those countermeasures aren’t as effective as they thought or hoped
Maybe the boat is out there TO hunt (or study) those creatures
For me the biggest plot-hole I see is that if those creatures are that dangerous and that common humans would have tried to wipe them out by now. Being in the water would have been no protection; look at whales and other endangered sea creatures. We probably would have attacked them using subs, depth charges, etc, and certainly would have killed any that even came near the surface.
We humans are so good at wiping out species that we specifically have to set up laws so that we don’t do it. We are not so good at sharing w/ any culture or any creature we perceive to be a threat
The most simple solution would be not making planes an option.
I mean if it is not the earth their technological evolution don’t need to be the same.
Carl Sagan said once that even if Venus had sapient life it is highly unprobable that they could develop spaceships, because with a perpetual clouded sky, they couldn’t see the stars.
The same way, maybe there are no birds, and without anythig flying around no one would dream on travel the sky. Maybe they lack a surface long enough to make an airfield, preventing them to use anything heavier than a comet.
Anyway, you just need to point it out that there are no planes, and it would stop being a plot hole. Whatever the reason is, it is it, period.
People can wonder why they don’t have planes in your setting, but that is not a plot hole, but a worldbuilding question that you can develop or not. It is similar to question why there isn’t teleporters on Harry Bosch novels.
So my answer is YES, you should always fix plot holes.
If you want to keep everything else about the world the same, I’d suggest some justification to do with lots of money – and the people with the money being able to avoid being on the boat. So, maybe a rare resource that needs to be collected from the ocean? Retrieving a precious item from sunken ship? Hunting a sea monster that is seen as a rare delicacy? The kind of thing that would be seen as prestigious, or would make a lot of money for the person funding the trip. As long as they can pay the crew enough, they’ll be able to find people willing to do the work, however dangerous it is.
Maybe they’re doing something involving secrecy and/or illegality, and ship travel is the only way to ensure it.
There are a lot of good alternatives in the comments. Another one I thought is limiting fuel.
If planes work with fuel processed from oil, it is possible that in your world oil is more limited than ours due to limited land. Given the presence of sea monster, extracting oil from sea or deep waters is so risky that is rare or non-existent in this world.
If another fuel source is used, just make sure that source is also scarce enough to make ships still a more economical solution, despite the dangers. In this way, while planes exist, they are just way more expensive and heroes cannot afford flying every time or there are even limitations imposed by governments on the use of planes.
Sounds good. I would advise a combination: the planes are small, unreliable biplanes that have a very small cargo space/engine allottage and the fuel is unreliable (probably coal/fantasy coal analogue). Maybe the planes, due to their small fuel allotment, crash frequently into the deeps and have a survival rate even worse than the boats! At least ships can afford dedicated anti-monster personnel, but planes can only have one pilot and a few passengers.
Maybe your crew could even be questing for a safe aviation fuel buried beneath the deeps! (It sounds boring to QUEST FOR GOOD FUEL until you do.)
Safe voyages,
Byakugan
The giant eagles aren’t a plot hole. The eagles are divas. They’re only interested in showing up when they can be the main event, not transportation.
More pragmatically, a bunch of eagles winging it to Mordor would be a lot easier to spot than nine dudes on foot and someone is going to want to know what they’re up to before they cross the Morannon. They were only able to fly straight to the mountain to get Frodo and Sam because everything in the Land of Shadows was literally falling apart.
The point is not what the Eagles could or couldn’t do. What makes it a plot hole is that is not explained. A scene about Gandalf asking them to bring them to Mordor and them refusing would suffice to explain why it wasn’t an option. They can change their mind later and do the right thing rescuing Frodo and Sam (it wouldn’t get more Deus Ex Machina than the actual ending). But getting no explanation whatsoever is what make it bad. If i recall correctly Galdalf is asked to bring the ring and he says “No, i can´t” so he ever carrying the Ring is out of question for the rest of the books.
Except that the number of eagles anyone but Gandalf actually encounter to ask for a ride before the end of the book is zero. They don’t come to the Council. To have a scene where Gandalf even asks about transport would require him to travel a week or more from Rivendell and then climb a mountain. Gwaihir comes to Orthanc because Gandalf asked someone to put the word out for news *months* previously. Even then, Gwaihir does explicitly state both that there is a pretty short cap on how far even he can carry someone (‘many leagues, but not to the ends of the earth.’) He drops him off at Edoras because it’s nearby and he can get a good horse there, which is a much better transport option.
If there needs to be a scene where the eagles refuse to carry them, or that they explicitly decide not to go by eagle (rather than, as we have, explicitly deciding that they should walk so as to go unnoticed,) are we also missing the scene where they ask the Beornings and are told they aren’t available? A couple of werebears would be really handy in the wilds.
Sure, in the movie I’ll grant you he could have just sent a moth, but that’s not something that’s in the book. The movie also oversells the impact of the eagles at the Battle of the Morannon; in the book their arrival is more a sign of the turn than its cause; it’s the destruction of the ring and the collapse of the Dark Lord’s power that breaks the armies of Mordor.
So, yes, the appearance of the eagles at the end is a deus ex machina. No-one, up to and including Tolkien, denies that. But the question is always ‘why are they here now?’ (divas) rather than ‘why didn’t we ride them all the way here?’ (there was never even a chance to ask, and we were specifically going for subtle.)
As i said, any explanation or just Gandalf’s word on it not being possible would deactivate the plot hole. Tolkien just had to bring the topic out and solve it.
If the answer is “the eagles were in position to rescue Frodo (as they knew he would be on Mount Doom) so they couldn’t be traveling around” it would solve both the plot hole and the Deus Ex Machina.
One always need to fix their plot holes, and the ones that remain are usually by overlooking them. In the end the specifics don’t matter as much as to actually fixing the plot hole. A parcial explanation is better than no explanation at all most of the times.
Do you want to make an article about how some plot holes are easy to fix and some would require rewriting the whole thing?
For example in Star Trek II they should not have confused the two planets. But a supervolcano or asteroid strike could have ruined the planet. That would be an easy fix.
But in Star Trek Generations there are so many plot holes it would be necessary to rewrite the entire movie. The numerous plot holes could not be fixed. Maybe the opening scene with the champagne bottle christening the Enterprise would be all right.