Loophole Abuse / Webcomics

Loophole Abuse in Webcomics.

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• 8-Bit Theater:
  • Red Mage would like to direct your attention to the Air Bud clause (Ain't no rule that says you can't use dice in rock-paper-scissors). This is also Black Mage's solution to an obstacle course: Ain't no rule that you can't just blow it up!
    Dwarf: Wow. No one's ever tried that before.
    Red Mage: That's because they weren't Bearded Warriors like us.
    Dwarf: That's a point.
    Red Mage: Yes, and one with no veiled meanings, either.
  • Also here:
    Black Mage: We're going to grab the non-fabric of this anti-space time and rip it a new one.
    Red Mage: Is that even possible? I'm not sure this place actually exists.
    Black Mage: Then there's no rule that says we can't.
• Aki Alliance: There's a rule against wearing a headset to receive outside help during a Scrabble competition. Oddly enough, there's no rule against wearing a headset to give outside help to someone else during a Scrabble competition.
• In Disney's Aladdin, the Genie tells the titular character he cannot make anyone fall in love, he cannot bring anyone back from the dead, and that Aladdin is not allowed to wish for more wishes. A webcomic has Aladdin get around this by wishing for Jasmine to lust after him (instead of love), retroactively make his loved ones immortal so they never died to begin with, and then wishes for a hundred more genies.
• Tristan pulls this in Angel Moxie so she can get away with a Non-Uniform Uniform in the form of striped stockings. She even recites the specific rule, noting that while there are limits on what kind of socks can be worn, stockings are allowed as an alternative and there are no such limitations for them.
• Avengers… Adventure!!!: This is how Natalie is able to get Heimdall's power back: since Loki was the one who let in the Jotun who started the chain of events that led to him on the throne, his claim is technically illegitimate.
• In Bad Machinery: Here.
  Erin: I can't exactly tell [the police] there's a devil-man sucking up people's SOULS.
  Lottie: Yeah, it does sound dippy. And also probably not even a crime.
  Mildred: THE LAW IS AN ASS.
• The Chrome Cowboy discusses the concept with Blade Bunny here.
• Protoman in Bob and George does this with his Three Laws Compliance.
  George: You're a robot! You're not allowed to kill humans!
  Protoman: That only applies if I think he's a human, which I don't.
• In the webcomic Brat-Halla, there ain't no rule saying that a god dueling another as a tie-breaker in the Pantheon Games can't call in his independently sentient, disembodied eyeball in a Humongous Mecha to help him. For extra amusement, after t'other god tries to cite its absence in the rules, that there ain't no rule saying you can, the eyeball in its mech comes in and cites the rule in question. Linksky.
• Subverted in this strip of Chasing the Sunset where there is a specific rule about knocking out a minotaur and stealing its keys to defeat a magic trial. Because it has already been abused, and the very first rule was that whenever someone says there Ain't No Rule, that rule is immediately added.
• In Collar 6 Sixx plans to win her bet with Butterfly by surrendering her title to Laura and becoming her slave so that she can take part in the contest directly.
• In this Cyanide and Happiness strip, a character manages to get around the classic three wishes limit clause ("A wish cannot be used to grant more wishes") by wishing for more genies.
• DICE: The Cube That Changes Everything: Dongtae realizes that as the Game Master X cannot attack a player directly unless he makes a rule that allows that as punishment, which he also has limitations about. All other casualties were Dicers killing each other by his suggestions, or technically count as transformations and not death.
• In Digger, the protagonist's ancestor, Descending-Helix, made a deal that he be paid for his work by making him and all his descendants immune to divine interference and prophecy. A few thousand years (and generations) later, his great*n-granddaughter gets roped into that business anyway, thanks to the interference of a prophetic slug. His ghost admits that he had neglected to fill that particular loophole.
• Dragon Ball Multiverse:
  • Only two people can enter the arena at a time. Keyword being enter. Meaning that Goten and Trunks can get away with fusing as Gotenks, entering the arena, and eventually defusing and competing as two people cause hey, only one actually entered the arena. Which happened with two incarnations of Gotenks. This also accidentally happened to U9 Videl when her Z Sword broke and released the old Kai in it. Since he came from the sword he was ruled an ally and allowed to stay in the arena.
  • Much later, U3 Raichi takes this trope up to eleven, where he summons the Frost Demons, all of Planet Vegeta AND the previously defeated combatants. Doesn't stop U13 Vegeta from instantly wiping a few of them out.
  • A few characters have taken advantage of the rule made to prevent excessive hiding or leaving, that if the judges cannot see you for more than thirty seconds you forfeit. XXI uses it against U16 Vegetto, trapping him in another dimension where time ran differently just to be sure and U18 Uub uses it on U11 Buu, vaporizing him down to one small final bit and then putting that bit in a container before he could reform. Technically the judges could not see Buu, and thus he lost.
• Eerie Cuties: The bonus story of vol.2's print edition has Blair trick Kade and Ace into playing a game of "Strip Trivial Pursuit" against Layla and Brooke, during which, he rigs the game so he can see the girls naked. Layla guesses wrong on her next turn, leaving her no choice but to take off her bra. However, Brooke saves her by cupping Layla's breasts from behind. When the boys object, she counters:
  Brooke: [smug] Ha! You boys haven't won anything yet!
  Kad: No fair!
  Ace: That's against the rules!"
  Brooke: [smug grin] I'm technically made of snakeskin, so I count as clothing!
• El Goonish Shive:
  • Immortals are only allowed to guide and empower mortals. The rules aren't an agreement between immortals, but a sort of species-wide curse they cast on themselves. If an immortal breaks the rules, the other immortals automatically gain knowledge of what happened, and the power to work together to force the offending immortal to reset. The immortals wouldn't have agreed to this if there was some way to break the rules on accident, so only the opinion of the immortal breaking the rules matters on deciding whether or not something is breaking the rules. This opens up the rules to a lot of loophole abuse, particularly if the immortal is crazy and thinks what they're doing is within the rules.
    • Helena and Demetrius tricked consent from Susan and Nanase when they were younger by giving them the false impression that they were the only two who could stop a monster. This ended up causing Susan enormous emotional damage, which later deeply angered Jerry, another immortal, when he learned her story.
    • Pandora has twisted the rules into pretzels by forcibly empowering unsuspecting mortals and pumping enough power into them to make them susceptible to suggestion bordering on Mind Control. Her son notes when explaining this, "even immortals have loopholes." We find out that this is an even bigger loophole later, because the mind-control aspect was added by another immortal, leading her son to suspect her, while what she was doing was relatively harmless.
    • An immortal can only attack a mortal in self-defense, but according to Jerry Grace is lucky he's a "wise and jolly" immortal ("Like Santa Claus!") because making a threat display, like the way Grace did, towards a more flinchy immortal would have been enough to make that immortal panic and attack the offender.
    • An immortal is "pushing guide and empower as far as they'll bend" by appearing as a godlike figure in the middle of a crowded mall and lying to a creature convinced that immortals are forbidden from lying.
    • Subverted when Voltaire vows not to attempt to kill Elliot. Mr. Verres points out that if Voltaire successfully kills Elliot, it's not an "attempt." Voltaire disagrees, and thinks that's a really stupid loophole since he'd have to be insane for that loophole to even work, but rewords his vow to close that loophole anyway just so Edward will get off his back.
    • Pandora increased the overall magic concentration in Moperville to incredibly high levels, allowing novices to use spells that they should never be able to. When Sarah learns of this, she immediately realizes that Chaos basically "empowered" the entire town. Furthermore, when Chaos realizes she has to fix what she did, she needs help from a mortal (which falls under the "guiding" rule), since she's not allowed to "dis-empower," even though she was behind the original empowering.
  • Magic itself is a quasi-sentient force that wants to be used and known about, but not widely known about or able to be used by many, which would seem to be contradictory goals since there's nothing stopping magic users from telling others about it and providing them the means to use it themselves, nor can magic simply go away. But there's nothing saying magic can't change the way it works, so that previous methods of using it are rendered useless, and only a few rare individuals will be initially able to use it again. Pandora witnessed the last time this happened several centuries ago in her past life.
  • The Crystalline Turtle Frog refuses to give out their name since it could be used to summon them. They can't even provide a fake name, since anything they come up with would have the same effect. However, there's nothing stopping someone else from just making up a name for them so long as they don't use it themselves, so Edward decides to call them Steve for convenience.
• Take one tabletop-gaming Rules Lawyer from our universe and drop him into an RPG Mechanics 'Verse with the instructions to "grant our side victory by any means possible". You now have the plot of Erfworld.
  • Some of the natives are extremely adept at this as well. For instance when Thinkamancer Maggie asks her thickheaded, jerkass overlord Stanley if she can give him a suggestion. When he says yes, he immediately takes a Suggestion spell in the face.
  • There is a whole type of Caster whose whole schtick is this: carnymancers. They can use their magic to either impose a new rule or break a rule of reality (canonical example is a carnymancer saving a heavily burned person from death by making them only able to die from fire if they bring that fate on themselves). According to carnymancers and as shown with a card game, they can't use the rules they themselves made to win a game/trick, only those rules that others made.
• Everyone Is Home:
  • In "Hyrule Travelers", Isabelle takes advantage of the Blood Moon and the fact that K. Rool sort of resembles a Lizalfos to revive him easily.
    Incineroar: (to Isabelle) Man, I'm glad we revived you early.
    • Becomes darkly hilarious when you remember that they didn't revive Isabelle, they just replaced her until the other one returned from the depths of Hell.
  • In an allusion to what fans might be thinking now that they have the Creation trio (sans Giratina) and Xerneas, the fighters can use them to revive everyone. Unfortunately, Sephiroth anticipated this and uses Giratina to steal the fighters' Pokémon and thwart their plan.
  • After watching Mega Man being revived by an extra life head, Kirby attempts to use a decapitated Mushroom Kingdom penguin head to revive King Dedede. As seen by the "fighters revived" panel, it didn't work, but kudos to him for trying.
  • "Mr. Arts & Crafts" sees Sora manage to revive Mr. Game & Watch... by using black construction paper and cutting out a "1UP".
  • How were the Mii Fighters revived? By taking them to the Mii Channel... and having their eyes replaced.
  • In "Multi-Purpose Pellets", Pac-Man consumes one of Mega Man's buster shots as if it was a Pac-Man pellet. The gang revives him by feeding him enough buster shots to reach 10,000 points.
  • Bayonetta gets advice from Scorpion on how to revive Ryu, Ken and Terry Bogard — just recreate the HUD of a fighting game (via Winged Pikmin and cardboard health bars) and then announce "Round 2: FIGHT!" to which they instantly get back up.
• Fire Emblem Heroes: A Day in the Life: In "Who Needs Iote's Shield?", the Summoner warns Petra about bows being effective against Flying units. Her solution is to climb off her pegasus and land on the ground, meaning she technically passes as an Infantry unit. Yune and Lilith, two flying units who can float, follow suit by simply landing and walking away from the battlefield. The Summoner is not pleased, telling them to play by the rules.
• Freefall: A vital survival skill for robots and other engineered intelligences, such as the uplifted wolf Florence Ambrose.
  • For instance, to get into a showing that only allows dogs if they are helper dogs, Florence claims to be there in case Winston needs help differentiating subatomic particles. (The usher wishes they had quantum mechanics helper dogs when he was in college.)
  • Another case: Robots are hard-coded to obey and protect humans. When one Jerkass boss fakes a heart attack in order to get to a meeting on time, this response forces them to abandon Florence in freezing water in the middle of a hurricane. With a few tips from Sam, the robots retaliate by "protecting" the boss from things that are bad for him, like coffee, sugar, and stress from meetings.
    Sam: I've never heard maniacal laughter from a robot before. It feels good to have brought something new and wonderful into the world.
  • Flashbacks show that this is how Florence got her education. Her adoptive parents couldn't get her into school as a student, because no one would accept a genetically engineered talking wolf. They were able to get her in as a helper dog for a disabled neighbor boy.
  • In one strip, Niomi reluctantly allows Sam to stay in her room for one night while they're on the station. Sam takes off, since she never said it had to be that night. Niomi isn't happy about it but reluctantly concedes the point.
• Fruit Incest double-subverts this one in "Rule". There's no rule against a duck playing on the school soccer team, but there is a rule that every player on the team must be enrolled as a student. But there's no rule against a duck being enrolled as a student, either.
• Full Frontal Nerdity: The players discover the horrendously overdesigned game they've been playing was actually created by a demon and they are now damned to play it forever. After reviewing the rules, Nelson determines that they're allowed to take breaks but there's no limit on how long those breaks can be. As such they take a "break" to bury the game in Frank's yard.
  • This is Nelson's hat in general really.
• Gaia Online's four towns engaged in loophole abuse during the "Reject Olympics" plot, by recruiting nonhuman athletes for their teams.
  • Johnny K. Gambino was apparently forbidden from creating new zombie serums. So for the Reject Olympics, he pulled an old prototype from storage instead.
• Girl Genius:
  • The Jägermonsters have agreed not to enter Mechanicsburg until there is a new Heterodyne and the Doom Bell rings. While Gkika has remained in town this is an open secret as far as the baron is concerned, since she's running a bar under her own name and the two are personally acquainted, the rest of the Jägers take this agreement seriously but see no problem with entering Mechanicsburg's labyrinth of underground passageways through "the sneaky gate" as long as they don't get caught or go upstairs into the town itself since they haven't really entered Mechanicsburg.
  • It's never explicitly spelled out, but it's highly likely that during his attack on Mechanicsburg, the wasp-infected Baron Wulfenbach does this with whatever orders he is given by Lucrezia.
  • When Agatha asks Otilia, the Muse of Protection, to follow Gil, she says she can't leave because she was assigned to protect Agatha by the Storm King. Tarvek tells her that Gil acknowledged him as the true heir to the Storm King, in front of witnesses, and therefore he has the authority to release her from this task. When Olita starts to point out all the ways this doesn't work, Tarvek just reminds her that she wants to protect Gil. (It probably helps that between the Storm King, her creator, and the Other, Olitia is already something of a mess of conflicting orders by this point.)
• In Goblins, demons making a deal with mortals have to obey the terms of their deal to the letter, or they are revoked and the demon is horribly punished. When Saves a Fox and Dies Horribly are searching for the Orb of Bloodlight, they find that it is guarded by demons. One demon holds an orb and promises it in exchange for a mortal soul. Dies, knowing his Meaningful Name is going to have to trigger sooner or later, immediately agrees to the terms so that Fox can at least get the orb. Of course it's a fake. Too bad for the demon, she agreed to give the orb in exchange for a mortal soul. Due to the artificial hand that Klik gave him, a bit carelessly, Dies Horribly actually now has two souls. So the deal is revoked, causing Dies to return to life with his prophetic death having already technically happened, and the demon gets hit with a heaping dose of Laser-Guided Karma. Thus, the heroes accidentally abuse Loophole Abuse, canceling out deliberate Loophole Abuse.
• Gunnerkrigg Court: When it comes time to choose a new Court Medium for dealing with the Forest, everyone is sure it will be Annie who gets the position, and Coyote has been not-so-subtly hinting that he wants it to happen as well. The Headmaster, however, wanting to curb Annie's behavioral problems, names Andrew the Medium instead. Coyote immediately turns it around on the Court and appoints Annie as the Forest's Medium for dealing with the Court, declaring her an honorary member of the Forest (as she had lived there for a summer). The Court has no right to interfere in Forest matters, so Coyote and Annie get what they want anyway.
• uu from Homestuck does this to Calliope (UU) during their chess game by making his king and queen wear hats so UU thinks they're the opposite pieces. As he points out, there's technically no rule against it, and he never had either of them move in a way they shouldn't have... Calliope is, naturally, very unimpressed, and when she plays on only to lose to him she Rage Quits rather impressively.
• Kevin & Kell: The Domain version of the Facebook game Farmville apparently doesn't disallow players from raiding their own henhouse.
• From Loli Loves Venom, when the little girl comes home with the Venom-symbiote:
  Girl: Oh Moooom!... I found a new friend! Can I keep it, pleeeeaase?!
  Mom: As long as it's not a dog.
• In Ménage à 3, Matt comes to believe that he's put Kiley off men for life by lying to her, which lead to them breaking up. So he swears to himself that he'll get her back, and that he won't sleep with other women from now on. However, he's bisexual — so this doesn't put a stop to his (very energetic) sex life.
• Emily wins her first race in Misfile. Ain't no rule against driving 25 mph once you're ahead of your opponent!
• In MMBN 7 The World Tournament Dr. Hikari realises in his match against Ryu & Cosmoman that Cosmoman's Infinite Cosmos attack locates the enemy and fires off an infinite number of meteors at them, but Cosmoman needs to actually see the opponent for it to work.
• TheOdd1sOut has a comic named "Parental Rules", featuring a young boy who was told by his father that "under his roof, you follow his rules". The boy then proceeds to burst the house's roof.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Therkla invokes this trope to her advantage in this page, using the exact phrasing of her orders to justify betraying the spirit of them. Fortunately for her, her invoked Lawful Evil master appreciates the effort.
    Kubota: Well done, Therkla. You managed to weasel your way out of responsibility for your own actions like a seasoned veteran.
  • The IFCC used this trope to their advantage via their deal with Vaarsuvius: they never said their brief ownership of V's soul would take place after their death.
  • In the one-thousandth strip: The Godsmoot has strict rules that include the stipulation that any bodyguard of a high priest who attacks another high priest is to be killed immediately. However, if it should be the case that someone was tricked to be the bodyguard of a priest who isn't what they say they are, there's no rule against attacking your own priest.
  • A little later, the loophole to attack the high priest in question gets closed when the High Priest of Hel transfers his position to another vampire as he leaves to dominate the Dwarven Elders. Since Roy wasn't designated as the bodyguard of that vampire, he's not allowed to kill her. However, he quickly exploits another loophole to ensure that Malack's staff doesn't fall into their hands.
    Roy: [snaps the staff on his knee] The Order of the Stick is not responsible for any damage that may occur during the delivery of unholy relics.
  • This is the source of Hel's enmity with Thor. As part of their wager, she claims the soul of every dead dwarf by default, unless they die with honor. Specifically to avoid that fate, the dwarves formed the most honor-bound society on the planet, because...
    Hel: I didn't know Thor would TELL them about it!
  • Invoked with followers of Loki, god of trickery. Since followers of Loki are supposed to be dishonorable, acting dishonorably honors their god, and so they can still go to Valhalla if they act dishonorably. However, acting honorably is still honorable, so they can go to Valhalla even if they act honorably. Not only that, but when it's pointed out that the gods might not tolerate this Loophole Abuse, Hilgya points out that Loki exists to perform Loophole Abuse on the gods, and is tolerated exactly because of what they can learn from this.
  • Thor also uses this to get around a rule stating that gods cannot discuss the Snarl with mortals, unless the mortal already knows about it somehow. Minrah lets it slip that she's heard the term "Snarl" mentioned by Durkon in passing, and Thor declares that's good enough for him, and he thinks it's a dumb rule.
  • When the dwarf clan elders are taking a vote that a group of vampires try to affect, and the heroes try to stop them, it becomes a duel of loopholes in the magically enforced rules. The first gate to the chamber dispels all magic and prevents non-dwarfs from entering, and no magic may be used within the second gate, so the dwarf-bodied vampires go through the first gate and use Charm Person after that. After that, they just have to give orders to the dominated elders — that's just talking so there's no rule against it — and further, nobody can use magic even to dispel the domination without being turned to stone. Durkon counters by breaking the table by which the elders sit, because even though he gets turned to stone for that too, the rules say no vote can be held without all the details like a proper table being in place.
• Paranatural has hitball, dodgeball under a different name so as to get around the dodgeball ban. In the game itself, a girl is covered with duct tape to avoid getting out, because you'd only be out if a ball hits you then the floor.
• The Constitution didn't provide for insane bunny senators and therefore did not lay down a rule about what to do when one goes missing. In Prickly City, this matters.
• In the Punderworld comic "death by paperwork", Persephone recommends dumping Theseus and Pirithous in Tartarus for trying to kidnap her. Since there are protocols for admissions to Tartarus, Hades has them fill out a mountain of paperwork instead. Persephone could not help but be impressed.
  Hades: If you want to avoid Tartarus and instead get back to your mortal life outside you will have to fill these forms correctly. I have found about 30 typos specifically in the sections Alpha 437 to Delta 304. Your name was signed incorrectly twice, oh and... did I mention this? Ancient Greek 2.0 is no longer valid language in this domain. You will have to take a course to learn the version 3, as there are quite a few terms that changed.
  Persephone: Wow... some punishments truly are worse than Tartarus.
  Hades: Thank you, dear. I do my best.
• PvP: Apparently, playing as the Doctor in a medieval-themed LARP is absolutely possible.
• In Rain (2010), Rain's plan to get another girl into prom ^note her friend Maria's girlfriend Chanel, who isn't a senior and so can only attend prom as a senior's guest. A boy is only allowed to take a girl and vice versa. However, since Rain is still registered under her dead name, Ryan, she writes in Chanel as her guest anyway, gambling that someone at the school who doesn't know her who sees the listing will think "Ryan" is a boy taking a female date. Then when she gets to prom and is clearly a girl, she'll claim to the reception hall staffer who is unaffiliated with her school that she thought the "bring a guest" option on the forms allowed her to bring a friend who wasn't a romantic date. It actually works.
• In Rhapsodies the local office of the Department of Minor Nuisances is unable to covertly support the Circle Band due to rules and budget concerns. Nothing wrong with doing it overtly, though.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
  • A strip involves a lawyer exploiting a loophole in the classic genie rules by renaming wishes to "splorks" and wishing that the rules only applied to the word "wish".
  • Another strip does a similar joke, except tying it to the absolute value of wishes.
  • Parodied in "Last Meal", where a convict asks for his last meal to be the executioner, and they have to comply.
    Executioner: On the one hand I'm mad, but on the other hand wow what a loophole.
  • "Testing": If your bio-ethics professor doesn't believe in non-medical animal testing, then she can't ask you to take an exam.
  • "Dear Lord": Instead of eating communion wafers, a man saves all of them and keeps them in his basement. He has amassed 150 pounds of them, so he technically has one Jesus in his basement right now. Because he has captured God, can he make a wish? God says sure and is amazed more people don't use the same loophole.
  • In this comic, a superhero girl has power to make puppies appear anywhere. A supervillain laughs at her but she then makes puppies appear IN HIS LUNGS, killing him instantly!
• Schlock Mercenary:
  • A hilarious variation occurs, where the crew of the mercenary ship effectively avoid any litigation by becoming legally appointed bounty hunters, hunting members of the lawyer collective. They could still be sued if anyone apart from them used non-Collective attorneys, but Massey is the only non-Collective lawyer we've seen, and he's a member of the company.
    Tagon: [having just shot someone's lawyer-drones] Get as mad as you want. You're going to have a hard time suing me.
  • Presumably, after this strip there's now a company policy regarding air vents, where there wasn't one previously. Since the air vents are properly small, the number of beings that could move around in them was limited... but for Schlock, air duct size doesn't matter much.
  • Tailor is a clothing-fabrication robot given to Captain Tagon by his father. The captain hates robots, his father, and isn't particularly crazy about new clothes, so he refuses to agree to any fittings. Tailor freaks out about not being able to fulfill his purpose, until the company doctor points out that the captain is responsible for clothing the entire company — therefore, Tailor can fulfill his purpose by creating clothing for her.
    Tailor: I'll have to padlock a couple logic gates, but I think it can work.
  • At one point, their ship is in orbit around what might be an ancient artifact, and Kevyn is ordered not to collaborate with anyone on figuring out what it is. (The conversation after that takes a quick turn into "how many assistants count as collaboration". Cindy thought they were pushing the envelope as it was.) When Tagon later asks Kevyn his opinion on the value of where they're located, he throws back "You explicitly ordered me not to collaborate on figuring this out." Tagon's reply? "I gave you an order with loopholes in it."
• Sheldon: One storyline has Gramp going on a liquid diet and attempting this. First he helps himself to some melted ice cream, which Arthur points out isn't technically a liquid ("I KNOW! AND IT HAS COOKIE DOUGH CHUNKS!" Gramp admits). Then he sticks a Twinkie in a blender and tried to purée it. It eventually culminates in him somehow getting his hands on a beaker of hydro-chloric acid and pouring it on a steak in order to create liquid steak. Which then proceeds to eat through the plate.
• Skin Horse: The titular team provides services to non-humans, defined as "individuals capable of identifying themselves as intelligent nonhuman sapients". A human brain wired to a helicopter is just as human as a human in a wheelchair — unless he's capable of identifying as a non-human, in which case the definition applies. You may think this is silly, but it doesn't matter what you think; all that matters is It's written down somewhere.
  Dr. Lee: So logic bows to paperwork.
  Tip: Of course. We're the government.
• In Sluggy Freelance, Torg is forced into a parody of the Tri-Wizard Tournament from Harry Potter, despite having no magical ability whatsoever. So, when faced with the task of defeating a giant, sword-wielding chicken, he interprets the rule saying "be resourceful and use the tools around you" to mean he can lift a magic-user out of the stands, point her at the chicken, and let her kill it. And if that fails, he's still got Plan B, yelling, "Eat her! I'm old and stringy!"
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: Mikkel pulls two of these in a row in Chapter 10, after Sigrun refuses to take him on a mission. He simply leaves on his own, claiming that Sigrun never told him not to leave the Cat-Tank, she just told him he couldn't go with her. When Tuuri points out that there is a rule against leaving non-immunes without a guard, he indicates Lalli, who is both immune and a capable fighter... and is so deeply asleep that multiple people moving him around and touching his face has failed to wake him.
• In the webcomic Terror Island, one arc involving a competition to skateboard over a river ends with the alien baddie teleporting over the river instead; he wins, because "teleporting" is one of the few things ''not'' prohibited by the contest's rules, as the people drawing it up couldn't conceive of it.
• Tower of God: In "Hell Train: The Dallar Show", the characters take part in a (deadly serious) competition inside a maze of pipes. Then Bam discovers that the stage is set up against his team so that he'd need to be on the opposite end of the maze to use his overpowered abilities to help his companions, who'll encounter the enemy boss at any moment. Well, the rules say you have to stay inside the pipes, but not that you can't magically move them to rearrange their structure so that the one you're in attaches to another on the opposite side.
• In the parody webcomic Van Von Hunter, Von Hunter and his (nameless) assistant agree to get out of the ghoul court's sentencing by making their last requests "Drop all the charges against my friend." After the assistant successfully gets Von Hunter set free this way, the judge points out that he's no longer being sentenced. Meaning he isn't entitled to a last request to use on releasing her.
• According to The Whiteboard, there is no rule forbidding the use of cross-country skis in paintball games. Doc checked very carefully.
• xkcd:
  • "There's no rule on the books saying a meerkat can't play rugby." Though, according to the Alt Text, there are rules against gorillas and golden retrievers.
  • In one of Black Hat's schemes, he takes the observation that standard internet server racks and beehive frames are both 19 inches and have similar pitches and runs with it, noting that most web hosting TOSes^*Terms of Service don't mention beehives in what's not allowed. The Alt Text calls back to the example listed above, noting that most TOSes also don't prevent dogs from playing baseball in the server facility.
  • This strip has Black Hat repeatedly trying to go around rules on meta-wishes in very convoluted ways. None seems to work.
  • "There's nothing in the rulebook that says we can't kill and eat your dog."
  • Played with in #1593, where Beret Guy seems to believe that stealing a base in baseball is loophole abuse. His reaction is, "Everyone's real mad but I guess they checked the rules and there's nothing that says he can't do that."
• In the fantasy comic strip Yamara, a toad familiar is tasked with bringing a newly revived ex-vampire her first non-blood meal in centuries. The cleric forbids him from serving her meat, while another character threatens him with punishment if he offers her fruits or vegetables. His solution is to serve her cream of mushroom soup.

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