Cutting The Knot / Webcomics

Cutting the Knot in Webcomics.

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• In 8-Bit Theater, in a mystic castle, Fighter is subjected to the trial of sloth, wherein the trial monster attempts to get Fighter to overcome his reliance on stagnant sword skills, and instead use his brain in combat for once. Fighter promptly slaughters the monster, stating that his brain told him that it was faster that way.
  • 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.
    Black Mage: Okay. I seem to remember some dead old king guy who, when presented with a problem of unsolvable perplexity, would blaze a path to victory via stabbity means. Therefore!
    *TINKTINKTINKTINKTINKTINK*
  • In episode 477, Red Mage traps Kary in a Bag of Holding, then casts the world-freezing Ice-9 spell into it:
    Red Mage: We've locked Kary in an inescapable prison where she shall remain until such time as we are powerful enough to defeat her. Quite simple.
    (White Mage smashes the frozen bag with her hammer.)
    Red Mage: Or, or there's that.
  • The biggest example is Black Mage's response upon being told that You Can't Fight Fate:
    Black Mage: Okay, I have a theory. It's called: I never knew it was possible to care less about Time Travel. *cue Black Hadouken*
• Adventurers! uses this a few times in order to subvert the usual RPG Puzzle.
• In one of the playable sections for The Anomaly, the player controls Undyne, and at one point, she's confronted with a crate pushing puzzle. Her solution? Smash the crates to pieces while making a variety of video game and anime references.
• Bob and George: Megaman points out the possible uses of the teleportation device.
• Hyraxx opens a door.
  • Buck Godot thinks he safely covered his tracks when he taunts an old enemy. But he overlooked one thing.
• Captain SNES: The Game Masta: A Superscope used to pick a tough lock. Alex's captor suggests that a MacGuffin Alex possessed at the time would've been the logical solution. Alex agrees (with hindsight) that he should've considered it.
• In Commander Kitty, Fortiscue insists on hauling the hard drive carrying 45% of the galaxy's population on in a special case loaded on a hand cart. CK simply unplugs the phone book-sized hard drive and hands it off to Mr. Socks.
• DM of the Rings parodies the habit of players to do this rather than actually engage with the DM's puzzles. When confronted with a door requiring a fairly easy-to-determine password, the players then suggest countless ways to try to break the door down, and are drawing up schematics for a battering ram when the DM just gives up and has Gandalf give the password.
• Exterminatus Now:
  • Parodied in a story arc referencing Resident Evil. The party comes across a hexagonal lock that requires a special key. Virus begins to describe the typical puzzles and side quests that would normally be required to find the key. Lothar just snaps off the chains holding the gate shut and the party continues through.
  • Wildfire demonstrates how she earned her nickname during their first mission together. The party flies their gunship, cloaked, near a truck transporting important evidence implicating a suspected heretic. After Lothar fails to stealthily enter the truck as it drives down the highway, Wildfire forces them to let her out in front of the speeding truck. She then proceeds to single-handedly destroy the truck, the others chew her out because she destroyed all of the evidence.
  • Wildfire's crowning achievement is during a mission to seal a dimensional rift letting demons into the mortal world. She initially manages to temporarily seal the breach by smashing a control console which allows their technical expert to perform a temporary shutdown. However afterwards, he starts to explain they will need to open a large number of switches, one by one in the proper order; only for Wildfire to jump the gun and destroy all of the switches at once. The resulting dimensional rift implosion then swallows the entire research facility along with a significant chunk of the surrounding wilderness and very nearly killing the main characters.
• Girl Genius:
  • Violence is a workable way to stop Lars from panicking. "I'm fine! Perfectly calm!" Of course, Jaegers (and DuPree, oh god, DuPree) tend to take this approach to everything.
  • Long ago, Robur Heterodyne had created a machine that summoned some Eldritch Abominations, which he believed had come to punish him for his sins (even if he wasn't sure which ones). His solution? Smash the machine. Have pie. Crisis over.
  • This is something of a family trait, as Agatha's solution to an out-of-control fencing robot is to chuck an oil-can at the off-switch, rather than try fencing. When it reactivates, she tries something even less conventional.
• Goblins plays this one brilliantly. When Dies Horribly's party is forced to solve the riddle of the temple guardian, Noe, who will kill them horribly if they summon him more than three times (and homonyms such as "know" and "no", which are used frequently, will also summon him) but will answer any "yes or no" question for each of said three. K'seliss solves the problem in a beautifully direct fashion: intentionally summoning him three times, then ripping his throat out as soon as he teleports in during the last one, having used said questions to make Noe confirm that it would work.
  • Tempts Fate is challenged with a devilishly complicated riddle by a talking door, and the wrong answer will unleash horrible death. Tempts Fate elects not to answer at all, and just opens the door, which wasn't locked. After all, it never said he had to give a right answer either.
  • At one point, tempts is confronted with a series of armor piercing arrow launchers that will kill anything attempting to cross the room. He jumps into the air, activating his magic belt, and his metal skin deflects them. The Rant Golem picks up a bit of sand, which is the solution, and passes by completely unharmed. Oddly, he knew the solution ahead of time, and but was bored.
  • Confronted by an immensely-powerful demon whom an enemy sics on her group in the Maze of Many, Kin deals with it by asking the demon its name, with which she can banish it back to Hell. As it's not happy being subjugated by a mortal, and she convinces it to trust her with the information, Kin's plan works where combat would've failed.
• Guilded Age: Frigg rescues kidnapped children. With her mace.
  • Frigg tops herself there when she applies this trope to chess.
• In Gunnerkrigg Court, when Reynardine is trapped by a complex magitek binding Antimony can't figure out how to free him. Jones smashes the device.
  • Earlier in the comic Antimony orders Renard to open a glass case with lockpicks that she hid inside his body. Renard, who was never actually taught how to pick locks, proceeds to smash the case with the said picks.
• Homestuck: Hearts Boxcars's preferred method of safecracking is to pry the safe from the wall with his bare hands. When he comes upon a safe he can't open with this method (because it's too big) and which requires solving complex time manipulation riddles to open, his solution is to look for a lot of explosives.
• Keychain of Creation had a fiendishly complicated lock, and a Lunar in her nine-foot-tall War Form with Super-Strength.
• Learning with Manga! FGO: The heroes confront an imposter disguised as Altria. Mash puts on a Sherlock Holmes outfit and looks like she's about to deduce her identity... then decides that would take too long and they should just pull her mask off.
• In this Looking for Group, Richard, while possessing a golem, is asked to undertake a perilous and tedious quest to free the mages caged in crystal by eventually getting three fangs from the "open mouth" of a twenty-headed dragon to smash a glowing crystal. Richard of course decides to take the easy way out and try to smash the crystal himself. Though it's not explicitly shown, he succeeded.
• In 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.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • The comic weasels provide an alternate solution Knights and Knaves problem by having Haley shoot one of them in the foot. They even gave a disgruntled Smart Guy, who had been about to work the thing out logically, a nice Lampshade Hanging:
    Vaarsuvius: Gordium called. They have a knot that you may want to take a look at.
  • Beautifully inverted by the encounter with the hydra, which they defeated by decapitating it until it didn't have enough blood for all the heads it regenerated. The group outwitted the test of brawn and bullied their way through the test of brains, leaving the test of heart... a medical examination.
  • Xykon may be the patron saint of this trope. "And now I see that planning doesn't matter. Strategy doesn't matter. Only two things matter: Force in as great a concentration as you can muster, and style. And in a pinch, style can slide."
  • Vaarsuvius's solution to preventing Daimyo Kubota from weaseling out of his trial is to disintegrate him and scatter the ashes.
• In Prezleek Comics, a RuneScape parody comic, Prez is blocked by a cobweb in the Wilderness. Normally, you're required to cut through the web with your knife, which may take a few tries. Prez gets frustrated after failing to cut the web and uses his axe to cut the tree supporting it instead, annoying the narrator.
  • To achieve the Guildmaster rank in the Archaeology skill, you have to open a locked case containing the previous Guildmaster's mattock, normally by finding and restoring the correct key. Prez smashed the case instead.
• Schlock Mercenary:
  • We're introduced to the concept of Lead Pipe Cryptanalysis. Funnily enough, the actual concept of "Rubber Hose Cryptoanalysis" does exist, and is even mentioned (and applied) a few times in the comic itself. It's just that Lt. Ebbirnoth's race is tough enough that a simple rubber hose won't do the trick.
  • Teraport Area Denial can be punched through by simply spending enough energy in the teraport. "Enough energy", however, is such a huge amount it's unavailable to nearly every entity in the galaxy, and the ones that have turned the galactic core into a giant power plant merely have it as a very, very costly option.
  • The long-guns, various versions of the LOTA/Credomar cannon, fire through TAD using micro-sized wormholes, bypassing the "knot" of Teraport Area Denial completely.
• In Skin Horse, when making their way through a VR Whimsyworld, Nick, Baron Mistycorn and Lovelace find themselves having to play a Game of Nim. So the Baron uses their recently acquired ability to duplicate objects to ... create a whole bunch of guns and point them at the puzzle setter, whose response is "Nice. Very Gordian."
• Supermegatopia: When Crushed and company are faced with navigating an evil-infested mansion (and risking a horrible death at the hands of the undead nasties sure to be lurking within) in order to destroy an ancient artifact, the intrepid heroine elects to simply torch the place and call it a day.
• xkcd:
  • This strip suggests a better method of dealing with heavily encrypted files.
  • This one deals with the mathematical Travelling Salesman Problem.
• In Yamara, some young adventurers demonstrate how obsolete "kick-in-the-door" Dungeon Crawling is, by detonating explosives in a dungeon's entrance and then breaking out the shovels to recover the loot.
• In a comic tagged with @inkyrickshaw: "He who can lift the sword shall become king." And strength alone is not enough to pull the sword from the stone. Enough strength can, however, allow you to lift the stone along with the sword — and make you intimidating enough that no-one will argue about the method.

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