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Cutting the Knot: Difference between revisions
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== Anime and Manga ==
* ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]''
** In one episode where the main characters are doing the [[Indy Escape]]. When they run out of places to... well, run, Honda turns around and punches the boulder as it's about to crush them. It pops. Turns out it was a balloon with a speaker inside.
** Also, the episode in which Kaiba literally crashes Pegasus' mainframe--[[Colony Drop|he smashes it with a satellite]].
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** In one episode, Roger is about to open a door using a high-tech device that would form the key for a lock when inserted, just before Dorothy just breaks the door open. ...with a one-handed push.
** In the last episode Roger [[Lampshades]] this trope when he was unconscious underwater and Dorothy was unable to give him the oxygen. So she simply busts the oxygen tank to fill the cockpit with oxygen. Roger asks why she couldn't have been more gentle, such as using [[Mouth To Mouth]]. (He wouldn't have asked that if he knew how small her internal tank was, apparently.)
* In ''[[Mouse]]'', one ancient challenge was to figure out how to untie this extremely hard knot. Alexander the Great solved it by simply cutting it. So to make the next one more challenging, they made the second knot out of metal chains.
* In ''[[Phi Brain: Kami no Puzzle|Phi Brain Kami no Puzzle]]'', [[The Protagonist|Daimon Kaito]] is trapped in a [[Death Trap|Fool's Puzzle]] in the form of a burning tower. Ideally, he would use a maze of elevators to reach the top where the goal is, but the flames have risen high enough to block the route. His solution is to break off the door of one of the elevators so that he can jump off when it passes a floor that ''will'' let him take the route to the goal.
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== Web Comics ==
* In ''[[8-Bit Theater
** [http://www.nuklearpower.com/2003/12/04/episode-359-flawless-victories/ Obstacle course? Mo' like ka-boom course.]
** Black Mage makes a reference to the [[Trope Namer]] when confronted with a sealed, metal door with a confusing riddle on it.
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** Vaarsuvius's solution to preventing [[Smug Snake|Daimyo Kubota]] from weaseling out of his trial is to [[Murder Is the Best Solution|Disintegrate him and scatter the ashes.]]
*** It's more like a solution to the problem that Kubota was distracting from V, Elan, and Dukon's attempts to reunite with the rest of the group. V had no clue who the heck Kubota was, so preventing him from escaping justice was just a happy side-effect.
* ''[[Adventurers!]]!'' uses this a few times in order to subvert the usual RPG Puzzle.
* In ''[[No Rest for The Wicked (webcomic)|No Rest for The Wicked]]'', Perrault propounds a scheme to get the owner of a castle with locked gates to let them through them. Red uses her ax on the gate.
* ''[[Girl Genius]]'': Violence is a workable way to [http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20050725 stop Lars from panicking]. "I'm fine! Perfectly calm!" Of course, Jaegers (and DuPree, oh god, ''[[Psycho for Hire|DuPree]]'') tend to take this approach to ''everything''.
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* ''[[Iron Man: Armored Adventures]]'': Tony's classmate Happy winds up in the armor and has to deal with a bomb about to go off. Tony doesn't know how to defuse the bomb...so Happy just snaps it in half.
* During Gaston's [[Villain Song]] in Disney's ''[[Beauty and the Beast]]'', the line "No one matches wits like Gaston!" is sung while Gaston is shown playing chess with someone... and throws the board and pieces into the air.
* ''[[Batman: The Animated Series]]'': This is often how Riddler's complex puzzles and deathtraps are solved.
** His debut episode involves a re-creation of a video game maze, which Batman [[Dungeon Bypass|bypasses]] by hacking the controls of the flying guardian; later, when faced with a robot minotaur, Bats orders the same guardian to ram it.
** In "What is Reality?", he lures the heroes into a virtual reality simulation by trapping Commissioner Gordon's consciousness inside it. When they get to the center, they discover that their goal is inside a [[Lawyer-Friendly Cameo|Baxter's box]]. Batman's solution? Turn his hands into hammers and break the damn thing, [[Brick Joke|referencing an earlier comment by Robin:]]
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== Real Life ==
* One of the best ways to disarm a nuclear bomb is ''to shoot it''. While this is incredibly counter-intuitive, most modern nuclear weapons operate in such a way that the desired nuclear yield will only occur if the high-explosive plates around it all fire at the exact same instant with an acceptable error in the fractions of seconds. So if one plate goes off too early, the bomb won't go critical, and the explosion will be...smaller. And still radioactive, but considerably less destructive.
** Also works for conventional explosives as well. Skilled bombmakers will include all sorts of intricate anti-tampering mechanisms to prevent the warhead being disarmed, but firing a .50-calibre bullet through the timer almost never fails; at worst you'll set the thing off prematurely, but if you know the bomb's there then you can clear the blast radius before the EOD team arrive.
* In the military, when opening a door in or around a combat zone that has not been previously entered one must first check for booby-traps, then carefully open the door, checking it for traps along the way, unless there is any chance whatsoever of a hostile inside the room, in which case you blow the hinges to hell with 12 gauge slugs or C4 then kick the door the rest of the way down.
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