in reply to At the end of the quest, I would hate to face:
You can't kill map in a void context, it has no explicit goal. Everything you do with map in void context is for the side effects, kind of like cloning yourself to get a heart transplant (and can you wait that long?).
Otherwise, I think the most dramatic is Sauron. How do you fight with an all-seeing eye that has no physical manifiestation? Sure, throw the hobbit^WGolem into the volcano, but what really happened there? If energy has a will, wouldn't it put itself back together again? (Which somehow reminds me of the "there's only one electron" idea -- how to distinguish one electron from another, or any quantum of energy from it's brethren?)
OK, back to Perl. What if the choices were Larry, TheDamian, MJD, Merlyn, Abigail-II, etc.? (Sorry, there's really too many to name even a portion of the superstars, so I'll just hit my top few.)
-QM
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Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of