Cutting the Knot in Literature.
- Animorphs:
- Suggested in book 20. The new boy in school has the Morphing Cube, and is going to sell it online; he has a timed e-mail set to go out that afternoon. Marco decides to bring Ax along to break into the system in case it's password-protected and swings by his and Tobias's living space to pick him up en route, but when he explains the situation to them, Tobias suggests he use this trope and just unhook the modem. Marco feels like an idiot for not thinking of the obvious solution himself. (Unfortunately, he can't get to the cord, either to the modem or the computer itself, in time.)
- Books 20-22 involve a story arc where the main villains, a race of Puppeteer Parasite aliens, are trying to infiltrate a major conference attended by several heads of state with the intention of infesting the majority of the world's leaders at once. The main characters try the stealthy sabotage route, which does not work. On their second attempt, they try something less clever: Turning into elephants and rhinos and trashing the event space so much that the event is canceled.
- Artemis Fowl:
- Holly had to defeat a number of projected holographic opponents as part of her entrance exam to the LEP. Rather than fight with all of the holograms, she simply shot the projector. They had to pass her because she technically defeated every single opponent.
- She also passed a different test by shooting Root with a paintball. He did say that doing so would let her pass automatically... but she shoots him in a situation which any sane person would consider inappropriate: he was about to fail her, and he asked if she could do something to change his mind.
- Codex Alera: Juris Macto is a legal dual where the challenger takes on the defendant or the defendant's champion for some legal or honor based reason when one doesn't have time or wants to try taking it up in the courts. It has been used at least twice in the series by the heroes to deal with complex political issues.
- In Captain's Fury Tavi has gained evidence that Senator Arnos is a corrupt and vile person with some bands of soldiers under his command raping and pillaging their fellow human settlements. As Tavi has learned he is the Princeps of the country and the hidden heir apparent, Tavi does have legal ways to stop him, but as they are currently in the middle of a battlefield against 7-10ft tall wolfmen working with some Alerans who want Arnos, his time options are limited, so he outright challenges the man to juris macto.
- In Princeps' Fury Isana, Tavi's aunt, is sent on a mission by the First Lord to broker a peace agreement with the Ice Men of the North, so the Aleran soldiers who guard there can be dispatched to fight a more dangerous enemy. Isana makes more headway in her communications with them than any Aleran before. However, High Lord Raucus, who has been fighting these "monsters" for over 30 years and buried countless soldiers, doesn't believe peace is possible. When he tries a Decaptication Strike against the leaders of the Ice Men, Isana saves them from his fiery blast by using her water magic to control the snow (a trick no one had ever considered doing before). She then challenges him to juris macto for his cowardice and betrayal of the First Lord's word. She uses it as a chance to break through his emotional barriers by using her water magic's empathic powers, while setting it where the Ice Men can see and using their own more powerful water magic to sense her genuine intent and resolve. Though she has to get a sword to her gut and technically loses, Raucus realizes his errors and submits to Isana while the Ice Men agree to the peace until the other enemy is vanquished.
- Discworld:
- In The Last Hero, a bard tells Cohen the Barbarian and his band of old heroes about the Tsortean Knot, expecting them to be impressed. Most of them just feel cutting it was rather a cheap move, but Cohen at least has a chuckle picturing the scene. And later, disguised as a god, he is asked to prove his divinity by beating the god of Fate at a game of dice. Fate rolls a six, and Cohen is reminded "Gods play to win," so he's got to roll higher... on a six-sided die. (A god could roll a seven, of course.) He calls his shot: "That's a knotty one. Ye'll remember I said that, lad?" He then rolls the die... and cuts it in half with his sword on the way down, so that it lands showing a six and a one.note note
- In Interesting Times, the same Silver Horde barbarians take a shortcut through the Imperial Palace by cutting their way through its paper walls.
- Another time, Granny Weatherwax challenges three prospective witches to knock her hat off. Two of them decline to attempt, one concentrates and fails to do anything. She then asks Nanny Ogg to demonstrate, who then throws a stick at her head.Girl: Any of us could have done that!
Granny: But you didn't. - This is a running theme in that particular book; the younger witches think witchcraft is about magic, while the older ones know that witchcraft is about having the capacity to think sensibly for three seconds in a row. When the younger witches still complain, Granny gets frustrated and obliges them by using magic to blow up Nanny's hat.
- Ender's Game: While Ender is still in his preliminary training to combat the bugger aliens, he enjoys whiling away his downtime on a computer game called "Freeplay". In one section of the game he encounters an evil giant who forces him to choose between two drinks; one of them is poison. After failing the test several times, Ender makes his character attack the giant and gouge his eyes out, allowing Ender to continue. The school's top brass takes this as a sign that Ender has what it takes to win the alien war.
- Interesting to note is that killing the giant isn't supposed to even be an option. The game is intended as a way of psychologically profiling the students. Both glasses are poisoned, and the whole setup is intended as a way of checking for suicidal tendencies. The accepted "right" answer is to stop going back to the Giant's Drink after failing a few times. When Ender kills the giant, he pretty much goes off the rails, and the game starts inventing new areas more directly based on his mind.
- This turns out to be very important, as Ender uses a similar method at the end of the book. Facing an enemy fleet several times larger than his own, with no hope of defeating them, Ender bypasses them with a tactic he devised earlier, and blows up the planet they're defending.
- The Executioner. In #59 Crude Kill, the terrorist leader traps Mack Bolan in a room full of booby traps, all triggered via different means. Rather than play his game, Bolan cuts a hole in the wall with his fighting knife and gets out without bothering to defuse anything.
- In the Dean Koontz novel The Face, Big Bad Corky Laputa is breaking into a secured area. The door is held in place with a chain latched with a massive padlock, one with an immensely thick metal clamp that bolt cutters will be useless against. Heck, Shoot Out the Lock might not even be an option! Corky ignores the lock completely and cuts the chain.
- Fire's ability to invoke this trope is frequently mentioned as a reason for its appeal in Fahrenheit 451.If there wasn't a solution, well then now there was no problem, either.
- Discussed in Stephen King's novel Firestarter: At one point in the story, John Rainbird muses over a training class he took part in regarding safe cracking. The instructor, an ex-con who was quite skilled in the activity in question, told a story about a group of thieves who tried to break into a safe in order to get the valuables inside. After futile attempts to crack the combination, they cut the proverbial knot using explosives to blow the safe open. The explosives worked too well; the safe was indeed cracked open, but the contents inside were also destroyed. The lesson being, you only beat the safe when you can successfully retrieve what's inside.
- Gentleman Bastard: Con Man Locke Lamore has been caught and poisoned by The Spymaster, an elderly woman who will only give him the antidote if he reveals his accomplices. Locke simply punches her in the face and chugs down the antidote.
- In the furry novel Heretic by Rukis Croax, the protagonist Luther is infamous for these.
- In the first chapter, they cite an incident where he saves his boyfriend's ship from an attack by pirates with Grecian raven-hooks on their boat by simply dumping all the boat's cannons overboard, so it rides too high in the water for the ravens to reach the deck.
- In a later scene, he's challenged his wife's former rapist to a duel - but, not being nobility, he doesn't know that they'll be obliged to use guns, and the nobleman opponent intentionally selects a gun that's very difficult to reload, so Luther will have only one shot. When they fight the duel, Luther misses, but gets shot in his dominant arm. Undeterred, he asks the doctor and seconds to clarify the rules - he has to kill his opponent with the gun, and isn't allowed to touch him. So while his opponent is fiddling with reloading his hard-to-reload firearm, Luther walks over to him and beats him to death with the butt of the gun.
- In How Kazir Won His Wife, Kazir wants to marry the daughter of a king. The king, with one always-truthful daughter and one always lying daughter sets him a series of Knights and Knaves puzzles, ending with an impossible one: he must determine both the name and the marital status of one of the king's daughters, whose honesty he does not know, with a single yes/no question. One of the king's daughters elopes with Kazir.
- In Humans, a safe cracker explains his favorite method of opening a small wall safe - break the safe out of the wall and take it home with you, where you'll have all the time you need to open it any way you prefer.
- The Hunger Games:
- Tributes are trapped in an arena where they must survive by killing all the other competitors. 24 years before the start of the series, Haymitch Abernathy spent his Game trying to find the edge of the arena, as if his survival plan was to escape the arena rather than win the game.
- In the second book Catching Fire, this is how the rebels save the heroine and (some of) her allies — not by helping her win the game but by getting her to destroy the force field separating the arena from the outside world.
- In A Woman's Work in the If I Were An Evil Overlord anthology, when faced with an indestructible door, the empress orders her men to tear down the wall next to it. Apparently no one ever thinks to reinforce the walls.
- In The Man Who Never Missed by Steve Perry, Emile Khadaji tests bouncer applicants to his bar by telling them to move a particular table, without telling them it's been bolted down to keep intoxicated patrons from weaponizing it (this particular table has slightly weaker bolts for the test). Sleel struggles a bit but breaks it loose, Gentle Giant Bork removes it easily. Then comes Dirisha Zuri, who was watching the first two from a hiding place. She smashes the tabletop free with a kick, then uses it to bludgeon the base free.Dirisha: It is moved.
Emile: (laughing) And you're hired. - The Robert A. Heinlein short story "The Long Watch" has a nuclear weapon engineer on the moon locking himself in a bunker (with all the nuclear warheads) to stop a rebelling officer from taking control of them in a coup attempt. His first thoughts are to defuse the "brain" circuits of each bomb, realizes he doesn't have enough time before those involved with the coup break into the bunker and ends up smashing the plutonium with a hammer. A heroic sacrifice, as known by anyone with solids chemistry experience: plutonium is an alpha emitter that oxidizes into a loose powder that can get everywhere. Smashing the plutonium wasn't the first option because, if you're standing around breathing the same air that's touching said plutonium, you've likely just sentenced yourself to a slow and painful death as your lungs fail (which can't even be stopped by removing yourself from the source of the powder). Indeed, the nuclear engineer stops the coup but dies of radiation poisoning in the process.
- Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest: One of the games at Land of Adventure is "Dunk the Ga-gorib", where you get three balls that dunk it in water if they hit the target. If they win, they get a prize. If they lose, the ga-gorib gets to dunk them, and it's implied that it actively drowns the participants. Instead of making the attempt, they just give the employee $100 and he just gives them the prize; a dagger with the Lost God's symbol on it.Troy: Feels like cheating.
Helen: It worked, didn't it? Legends are full of heroes breaking the rules and getting away with it. - In The Magician King Eliot explains that the keys he had to find were all guarded by a monster or a puzzle, but when they got to the beach entirely made out of keys, they couldn't figure out the answer. So instead they just spent a couple weeks testing keys 24 hours a day until they found the one that fit.
- Not Cinderella's Type: Turns out treating a kid like Cinderella is illegal. No need for the Prince to go through the Ball and Slipper nonsense when he can just make a phone call and get the police involved.
- In Phule's Company, the Omega Squad learns soon after Phule takes over that the fastest way to get through an obstacle course leaves it needing to be rebuilt. They were being tested under battlefield conditions.
- In The Princess Bride, Inigo and Fezzik inadvertently use this trope. They are trying to get through Humperdinck's sinister and booby-trapped Zoo of Death. The first staircase has a mighty snake that Fezzik must overpower. The second staircase is pitch-black with poisonous bats, requiring Inigo's superhuman sword skills to detect and skewer. The third and final staircase looks completely ordinary and harmless. However, by this point, Fezzik is so scared that he rams through the door at the bottom in a panic, not bothering to turn the knob. Then Inigo casually steps on a spider that emerges from the broken door. Neither of them realize that the spider (an incredibly poisonous and aggressive type that lived behind the doorknob) was the trap.
- The novelization of the first Resident Evil title has a scene analogous to the "Armor Room" puzzle from the actual game. Instead of manipulating two statues to block the poison gas vents before pressing the button to unlock the crest kept under glass (as happens in the game), Jill simply uses the butt of her pistol to smash the case and grab the crest - an option that, sadly, is not available in the game itself.
- The Riftwar Cycle Pug has a "Eureka!" Moment along these lines in Tsuranuanni, when he wants to build a house. Technically, he has the right to requisition goods and labor from any citizen of the Empire, who will then be reimbursed by the Imperial treasury, but to the craftsmen he needs to get his house built, getting money from the treasury is like squeezing Dr. Pepper from hand grenades, and Pug doesn't want to use his position to extort goods and services from poor craftsmen. He cuts the knot by requisitioning cash from a rich and smarmy moneylender, and leaves it to the moneylender to get his money back (the guy has the book-keeping skills and connections to possibly see some of that money reimbursed, and even if he can't get it back it's not like he'll starve or anything). Meanwhile, Pug builds his popularity by being the first Great One ever to pay for stuff with cash.
- In Rivers of London, Nightingale and Gant discover two vampires sleeping in the cellar of a suburban family home. Rather than go through the lengthy and risky business with stakes and garlic and so forth, they toss white phosphorous grenades into the cellar and let the house burn to ashes along with all of its contents.
- This is employed in the third book of A Series of Unfortunate Events, when, after all measures have failed to prove that Captain Sham is Count Olaf in a Paper-Thin Disguise, Sunny opts to simply chomp down on his fake peg leg until it cracks in half. The Lemony Narrator even describes it as such, recounting the legend of the Gordian Knot (and sarcastically noting that really, Alexander cheated, but Gordius couldn't exactly say no because then Alexander would just kill him).
- Simon Ark: In one story a magician doing an escape trick is placed in a wardrobe that is chained and padlocked shut. To ensure no tampering with the padlock, a matchstick is snapped off in the keyhole and wax is poured over the top. When the wardrobe is opened the next day, the magician has been murdered and the lock is untampered with. Simon later explain the devastatingly simple method the killer used. The killer cut the lock off, then replaced it after the murder with an identical looking padlock: snapping off a matchstick in it and sealing it with wax to replicate the original. With the matchstick and wax, there is no way to verify that the original key actually fits the lock.
- In The Stormlight Archive, Highprince Sadeas has been scheming and undermining the Kholin family nonstop throughout the first two novels, and maneuvering to take the throne, even in the face of the impending Desolation. At the end of the second book, Words of Radiance, he privately gloats to Adolin Kholin, heir to his rival's house, that he will continue to plot and scheme and undermine them all, and there's nothing that the Kholins can do about it openly, since they need Sadeas' house and armies. Since there are no witnesses, Adolin promptly stabs him in eye, killing Sadeas and ending his threat permanently.
- Throughout The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was, the titular youth jumps into increasingly odd and dangerous situations so that he can learn how to fear, but never once feels afraid. Since the boy specifically wanted to learn to shudder, his wife the princess dumps icy river water on him, which makes him shudder from the cold.
- Stranger Things: Darkness on the Edge of Town: On Jim's first night out with The Vipers, he's brought to an electronics store where the windows are barred up, and the door is padlocked. Martha W. solves the latter problem by smashing the lock off with a sledgehammer.
- Temeraire: Throne of Jade begins with a Chinese embassy demanding the return of the Celestial they call Lung Tien Xiang and Captain Laurence's refusal to trick or manipulate the dragon he raised from a hatchling into leaving. When Admiral Lenton pointed out the difficulty of getting a 20 ton dragon that refuses to be parted from his handler to go anywhere to the head of the Chinese delegation.Prince Yongxing: Then plainly Captain Lawrence must come also; or will you now attempt to convince us that he cannot be sent?
- This is part of a larger problem, that only members of the imperial family can be companion to a Celestial. They solve this by having the emperor adopt Lawrence. Lawrence even refers to the solution (via the narration) as severing the knot.
- Tortall Universe:
- In the second Song of the Lioness book, Alanna is also confronted with a door charmed against lockpicking. She puts both hands on it and shoves her magic into the lock, forcefully exploding the spell. Her cat Faithful compliments her on the technique.
- In The Immortals, young dragon Kit's lockpicking spell fails on a magic lock, so she just uses a different spell to yank it out of the door.
- Averted in Bloodhound, where Beka and Goodwin are given a briefcase charmed for protection before setting out to Port Caynn. The spell is on the whole case, "none of this spelled-the-buckle-so-cut-the-leather nonsense."
- Wax and Wayne: In The Bands of Mourning, the crew needs to get past a heavily trapped hallway in a Temple of Doom. Since they have a Kandra with them, they send her first to trigger all the traps, which she can No-Sell. The only one that could actually hurt her is a deluge of acid, which harmlessly froze into a solid block years ago, since the temple is located in an icy mountain range.
- Wet Desert: Tracking Down a Terrorist on the Colorado River: Greg cuts the rope of the Mastercraft boat when the dropping water levels in Lake Powell cause the rope it was attached to to become too tight and make loosening it difficult.
- In Wolf Hall, Henry VIII has spent several years unsuccessfully trying to annul his marriage to Katharine of Aragon, and Cardinal Wolsey ends up dead for his inability to convince either Pope or cardinals to approve it. (The Pope was at that time effectively prisoner of Katharine's nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor, so there was no way he would do it.) Thomas Cromwell decides to fix the problem and advance Protestantism at the same time by cooking up some legalities that will allow Henry to declare himself head of the Church in England, thereby allowing him to annul his own marriage.
