Cutting the Knot in Anime and Manga.
- In a two-parter from the 1980s Astro Boy anime titled "The World's Strongest Robot", the mighty robot Pluto faces off against the German robot Gerhardt. Pluto's brute size and strength are useless against Gerhardt, as he is much smaller and nimbler. The massive horns on his head are too unwieldy to stab him, too, and the electric current they emit is rendered useless by the special alloy that composes Gerhardt's body. So what does Pluto do when Gerhardt grabs onto his horns to mock him? Tug on his horns and split Gerhardt down the middle. He then makes sure to bend his horns back into place.
- Ayakashi Triangle: Lu suggests fighting Medusa by reflecting its Deadly Gaze back at it with a dressing mirror. Since this Medusa usually keeps its main eyes closed sees through its snakes, it simply breaks the mirror to pieces before the plan can go into effect.
- The Big O: 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). She responds that the water displacement was quicker and far more effective by bursting the tank anyway.
- Black Butler: One arc sees the Phantomhive house intending to venture into an area considered cursed by the locals. One such local is willing to tell them all they want to know about the "curse", but refuses to take them there with his carriage, no matter how much money they offer. Ciel merely offers to buy the carriage off him instead so they can drive themselves.
- Cardcaptor Sakura: When Sakura, Syaoran and Tomoyo are trapped inside The Maze. Even after using other Clow Cards to cheat their way out, the group doesn't manage to do anything, until they meet their teacher Kaho Mizuki. She shows she has a special bell that is the way out of the maze: it can destroy the walls and create a path out.
- Code Geass: Lelouch's Geass has anyone affected by it forced to follow out the command he gives them. However, he can only do this to a person once, as they are unaffected if he tries again. Early on he has to plan around this carefully, but by season 2, by his own admission, he starts to cheat with this rule. Namely, commanding them to follow his every command, making it so he doesn't have to worry about this limitation.
- Dragon Ball:
- Master Roshi/Jackie Chun pulls this off when Goku transforms into a Great Ape during the World Martial Arts Tournament. Yamcha tries to tell him he needs to cut off Goku's tail to change him back. Roshi opts for a more permanent solution by blowing up the moon itself.
- The Namekian Dragon Balls were supposed to be gathered only by the worthy, with each village offering a different test to anyone who came looking for them. Frieza opts to just slaughter all the Namekians and take them by force. This bites him in the ass hard later on when he gets all seven Dragon Balls... and can't do anything with them. The dragon Porunga only understands Namekian, and Frieza's genocide of the Namekians means that there's no one left who speaks the language. The heroes ultimately manage to steal his wishes out from under him by virtue of saving Dende, who translated their wishes for them.
- Durarara!!: How Shizuo solves every one of his problems. Tangled and complicated schemes involving mafia and set-ups and supernatural creatures? It must be time to beat Izaya's face in again. Problem solved.
- Fate/Zero has a few examples. Ironically, of all characters, Alexander the Great, in spite of both being the Trope Namer and going around with the chariot that has the Gordian Knot, never does it:
- Kayneth Archibald had rented most of a hotel and, for defense, filled it with magical traps, demons, gateways that open into other dimensions, and the likes. Kiritsugu just blew up the unprotected bottom floors and brought the whole thing down, with Kayneth still inside.
- That was part of another attempt at this: Saber's arm had been wounded by Lancer with a cursed weapon, so they could have made a few attempts at fighting a powerful curse... Or just kill Lancer, who, as Kayneth's Servant, is always with him, thus dispelling the source of the curse with him. In the end the curse is dispelled during the battle with Caster, when Lancer, knowing that Saber is the only one who can stop the crazy Servant and his monster, breaks the cursed lance.
- Rider's status as the Trope Namer IS alluded to a bit, during the hunt for Caster. While everybody else is using the standard "Look around, we'll find him eventually" method, Waver goes for what he calls a more basic approach: He collects water from the river running through the city, and tests it for excess mana. Waver says it's nothing special and a very basic technique that literally any Magus could do, but Rider tells him that often the simplest course of action is the best. Indeed, they do find Caster's lair, when nobody else managed it.
- In Gundam Build Divers, Riku and Kyoya have initiated a massive Gunpla Battle for the fate of Sarah, who is threatening the Gunpla Battle Nexus Online game by existing, but the heroes may have a way to save her. Game Master, one of the administrators of the game, decides to solve all this by sticking to the original plan and deleting her while they're off fighting. Subverted in that Kyoya had used his Force Nest administration powers to prevent Game Master from going behind his back, cheesing off both men.
- The harem game that is central to Harem Royale - When the Game Ends - could be won by one of the girls successfully romancing Asunaro... or by one of the girls killing off all of the competition, so only she can be the winner. Serika points this out, then uses this to prove that the others can trust her (since if she wanted to kill them, she would have done so without telling them).
- Hunter × Hunter:
- To advance through part of the Hunter Exam, Gon is given the choice of two candles by his opponents, and they compete to keep theirs burning for the longest. After some I Know You Know I Know, Gon ends up with the much faster-burning candle, but just uses the bigger flame to freely move around without fear of his candle getting blown out by the wind and blows out the other one.
- Later in the same arc, the group is confronted with two doors: one leads to a short path to the exit, but only allows three people from the group of five to pass, while the other has a long path (and will take too long for them to get to the exit in time, which will result in all of them failing the test) but will allow them all. Either some can make it, or no one? They take the third option.note They entered the long and difficult path, then cut a hole in the wall, to sneak in the short and easy path. It takes a lot of effort, but it's faster than the long passage would have been.
- Gon beats a guy who rotated super-fast to defend himself by ripping the floor out from under him.
- Gon and Killua are locked in a room with Nobunaga, who, if they try to escape using the room's one door, will kill them instantly. They know for sure that there's no way that they can defeat Nobunaga, and he will not move from the door. How do they escape? They bash in the wall opposite the door with one hit, and then run like hell. He follows them, so they destroy half a dozen of walls, backtrack to the one before the last and simply use the door to exit the building while he is searching the last room.
- In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Okuyasu needed to quickly find out which of the two SPW workers is about to assassinate Joseph Joestar. However, he had little evidence and is rather dim-witted. His solution? Punch both and ask questions later. Thankfully he got the correct one on the first try.
- Kill la Kill:
- Ryuko's battle with Inumuta during the Naturals Election ends with this, as Ryuko defeats an invisible Inumata not by sussing out his location but by transforming part of her suit into a giant flyswatter and hitting the whole arena at once, flattening him.
- In her next battle, with Jakuzure, Ryuko uses miniature grappling hooks from Senketsu to anchor her on the platform so Jakuzure's sound blasts can't move her. Jakuzure can't damage Senketsu, so she simply destroys the ground Ryuko is standing on.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS has Nanoha's famous Dungeon Bypass to take out Quattro. So much for a ship full of super defenses, eh?
- Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: Having taken first place in the written part of the wizard's exam, Kobayashi is warned that she will be challenged to duels for her position, and refusing would result in a loss of prestige, which no wizard wants. Since she is not a wizard and doesn't care about prestige, Kobayashi resolves to refuse any challenges.
- 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.
- My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong, as I Expected: Hikigaya Hachiman's approach to problems. A girl is being made an outsider by a group of friends? Don't do the arduous and likely impossible task of helping her become friends with the group. Just break up the friend group.
- In Naruto, during the Five Kage Meeting arc, Sasuke intends to kill Danzo for revenge. Sasuke gains the upper hand in their battle at one point. Danzo then takes one of Sasuke's teammates as a Human Shield hoping to stall Sasuke for long enough to activate his mind-control technique. However, without a moment of hesitation, Sasuke gets rid of the problem by piercing his lightning-based jutsu through both his teammate and Danzo.
- One Piece:
- The Straw Hat Pirates get caught in the Seducing Woods, a forest whose living trees and other shrubbery rearrange themselves to trap visitors in the forest forever. The Straw Hats' ageed-upon solution to get out of this situation is to destroy as much of the foliage as they can, causing mass panic among the flora. It reaches the point where Kingbaum, the leader of the trees, submits to the Straw Hat Pirates as he doesn't want to die either. (In truth, the trees' sentience was artificially induced by putting souls into them; when destroyed, the souls simply return to whomever they originally belonged to.)
- In Phi-Brain: Puzzle of God, Daimon Kaito is trapped in a 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.
- One tournament in Pokémon Adventures lets anyone with eight gym badges automatically qualify for the finals. Silver stole them when the gyms were closed.
- In Pretty Cure All Stars: Spring Carnival, the Smile Pretty Cure! team is caught up in a path filled with various traps. Cure Sunny is prepared to go through them before Cure Happy just smashes down the nearby wall and has them go through that instead.
- In Sailor Moon season one, Sailor Jupiter, upon the Senshi finding a locked door during the 1990s anime, decided to bust through said door with her Supreme Thunder, while the others were debating about how to get through and Sailor Mercury examining the door with her computer.
- In Spy X Family, Twilight (in disguise) deals with a bomb inside a clock by yeeting it over the side of the ship and into the water (where it blows up near the bombers' boat, capsizing them).
- The Testament Of Sister New Devil STORM: In a significant departure from the original ending, Basara ends the attempts of various groups of demons to get control of Mio for the power she inherited from her father by using his Banishing Shift to eliminate that power altogether, making her fully human as a consequence.
- 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/Tristan 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—he smashes it with a satellite. Subverted in the original Japanese version, where he takes over the satellite via a back door into its programming, and then uses it to hack the mainframe.
- In Yu-Gi-Oh!: Capsule Monsters, the gang gets trapped in a maze and struggle to navigate their way through — until Tristan acquires a monster (Shovel Crusher) that smashes its way through the walls.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V does this frequently, in order to make the characters actions more realistic. Emotional duelists usually use their fists first unless they're already engaged in a duel. The crazy possessed guy using card games to seal souls gets physically held down and away from his deck until he recovers. Duelists will research their opponent if the duel is pre-determined to build a deck specifically for the duel. The corrupt Security just call in for backup when the people they're trying to arrest beat them in a duel, and build road blocks to stop them from escaping.
