Hated Tropes
"Good guys" committing perfidy (fake surrender) and it's treated as a clever heroic ploy instead of a war crime or something morally dubious
Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Anakin pretends to surrender to the enemy multiple times during the Clone Wars. And no, it's not used to indicate that Anakin is falling to the Dark Side, other characters like Obi-Wan do it too.
The Iliad. The Trojan Horse was a real dick move, a fake surrender compounded by a fake peace offering, followed by a massacre. I get that it was a different time, but still, most modern adaptations just treat it as a cool thing. One thing I'll give Nolan's The Odyssey credit for is that Odysseus recognizes that what his "clever plot" was wrong.
Perfidy is a serious war crime, because morality aside, in exchange for one victory, you're dooming all of your allies who might want to legitimately surrender in the future because now the enemy is just going to execute them, not to mention that now the enemy won't surrender to you and will just fight harder.
Naah, that's spesifically not a warcrime, he checked. Skit is more about him being the first person to check for what is in the accords, meaning no other jedi ever checked.
They did take at least one prisoner on Umbara, as we see with Luco Bronc in Zero Company. So they probably did take Umbarans prisoner. We just never saw a scene where they actually surrendered I don’t think
There is one scene where an umbaran has his mask broken and seems to be begging for his life, but is shot in the head execution style (by rex?).
You're right though. They did capture Luco, but his capture seems more intentional as a way free Dozen since the sepertists didn't greenlight the exchange. Rhy Cesca made an exception solely because she was Lucos lover.Perhaps other Umbarans were also captured, but I haven't seen anything to go off of.
It Was Actually Fives Who Did That, Though There Is a Scene Where Rex Double-Taps a Umbaran That Felt Out Of his Vehicle After One Of the Clones Destroys the Glass With a Rocket Launcher.
TBF, he calls out Obi Wan and Anakin on it at the same time “A war crime would be faking a surrender, which you and your chuckle fuck of an apprentice have done, REPEATEDLY.”
Yeah, if Bond gets captured he's just going to be executed anyway, even if he was working against a legitimate government and not a movie villain he'd still have zero protections, but that also means he isn't really bound by any laws or conventions
tbf its not in war. i'd struggle to find a morally dubious side to lying to a bunch of lunatic global terrorists to get the upper hand. its not like spectre would care if the shoe was on the other foot.
Also if it was in war, James Bond would be a not uniformed spy/combatant and therefore already inherently comitting perfidy. The Geneva and Hauge Conventions specifically class spies as someone war crime law does not apply to and they can be executed on the spot.
When they sliced off Zendaya’s head in Troy they cut to the statue of Athena’s statue’s head being cut off and falling to the ground.
Which could be metaphorical but Athena is also the goddess of strategic warfare and Odysseus exemplifies everything she stands for. So it would make sense for her to favor him.
But the Gods actually exist and they didn’t keep saying that you don’t know who’s a God for nothing.
In the script the woman they kill is also described as having Athena’s famous grey eyes of wisdom.
I still think it’s ambiguous but Nolan is as subtle as a brick to the face in his movies so it was probably her.
They referenced the Gods travel incognito and you should treat people respectfully just in case they are gods MULTIPLE TIMES.
Like straight up: it was intended to be Athena. They cut off Athena's head. The whole trip was a punishment for the Greeks being assholes led by Odysseus's plan.
Yeah, but in the original text, Athena is the one who gives them instructions for building the horse in the first place.
It's a crazy reversal from the original. The gods were taking part in the Trojan war as much as the humans - hence the whole Judgment of Paris in the first place.
Athena and Hera were pissed because Aphrodite was judged most beautiful, so they were on the side of the Greeks, and Aphrodite was on the side of Troy.
I'm pretty sure Athena still ends up being pissed off that the greeks desecrated her temples. The gods are very fickle in those stories, if anything it's unusual that Athena always seems to stay on Odysseus' side no matter what
It's interesting how people took it this way, that she was entirely in his head.
Ya I interpreted it as Athena
taking on the form of the woman he watched killed infront of him. After all he didn't remember what happened/who we was until we did.
Yeah I liked Nolan’s Odyssey but I disliked the characters developing modern moral codes, and also the part where Anne Hathaway reads aloud the Wikipedia page of the Bronze Age collapse.
I think he went for a similar message in Oppenheimer, but there it worked much better because the real Oppenheimer had similar opinions in modern times. Odysseus should be like “fuck yeah I tricked these dumb Trojans and killed them in their walls” and Athena should be his number one cheerleader.
Also the movie had Agamemnon kill a baby daughter for good winds, when in the original the goddess Artemis forced him to sacrifice his adult daughter because he killed her sacred stag on an unrelated hunt. Not sure why that change was necessary. And in general he made Agamemnon be like Thanos for some reason, with a superhero armor, which I found hilarious.
Edit: in general I hate when characters in ancient settings develop modern morals. Tyrion “I burned thousands of men through trickery” Lannister lecturing Daenerys about how burning people is against the Geneva conventions will never not be funny.
It’s particularly funny because in the original poem, Odysseus was outright bragging to the Phaeacians about his actions so they would take him back to Ithaca.
And he breaks down into uncontrollable weeping twice with the Phaeacians, when he recounts the sack and when he hears it recounted to him. The Odyssey is a complex story.
Eh, Athena very quickly turned against the Greeks once they started acting like savages during the actual sacking. Nolan wasn't too far off there, since in the movie her disapproval seems to stem from the raping of one of her priestesses.
And even if they were, Odysseus is very much meant to be morally ambiguous, to the point that the Odyssey ends with Athena (goddess of everything he’s good at basically) having to show up in-person to tell everybody he’s chill.
The Greek concept of a hero was basically just someone who did incredibly impressive deeds, usually with the Gods’ favor, not someone who was actually heroic by today’s standards.
That, and Zeus and Hera were not couple goals. Thundercock McWhoreson couldn't stop shagging anything that moved, and often things that didn't, while Hera unleashed her wrath on the parties not responsible, like the woman that was duped, or the offspring.
Also, Hades wasn't necessarily evil, he just drew the short straw.
Yeah, "heroic" is very subjective by the times. And even then, Odysseus would've been considered what we can an anti-hero, since he used edgy underhanded tactics rather than honorably giving a fair fight.
Other Greek heroes also used a little trickery every now and then, but that was Odysseus's whole thing
Different set of morals entirely. There wasn't a good bad dichotomy like we understand today.
More along the lines of he had a role in their society to fill with corresponding virtues to embody, and filled that amazingly well and by doing that was a great person
It also wasn't technically Perfidy. They even left somebody to explicitly tell the Trojans not to take the horse because it was an offering for Athena and not them, it just happened to be really effective reverse psychology with the Trojans saying "Screw you! We're taking it!"
If I remember my ancient literature right, that part didn’t exist in the original greek versions, but was rather added afterwards in the roman „fanfic“.
Iliou persis Is almost completely Lost, yes. We have 10 original verses and a couple of summaries.
We have a Roman retelling of the events in Virgil's Aeneid, so maybe that's what the commenter was referencing. But the dedicati in of the horse to Athena predates the Epic.
Also calling the Aeneid "Roman Fanfiction" Is highly reductive to both the scope of the work and its true pourpose
Depends heavily on the telling. That said, when civilizations have harkened back to the war for their founding myths, they overwhelmingly have looked to Hector, Aeneas, and Troy, not Achilles, Agamemnon, and the Aecheans
I think for perfidy to be even a conceivable tactic, it must be dishonorable.
If perfidy was considered a standard option to take, no one would actually spare surrendering soldiers or lower their guard around them and therefore no one would fall for it.
Worth noting that after he calls the guy out for wearing brown pants (implying he's going to shit himself), the guy opens fire on Deadpool. So even if Wade had been surrendering and not just aura farming, his "surrender" was rejected anyways.
I actually watched Deadpool last night. I'm afraid you are wrong, he says "wait!" not, "I surrender!" He just wanted to get that line in. Before that, he also pops his head out of the car and says "Hey!" before being shot at.
He also waves his underwear as a white flag near the end, to talk with the mercs. He offers them mercy, saying that they just work for Francis and they don't have to fight. They then fire at him in response, and then he kills them.
To add to your last point, Japanese soldiers used to do it all the time. Eventually American soldiers started just shooting all surrendering Japanese soldiers.
It really came into play late in the war when Japan was using a lot conscripts as well as colonial troops and way more Japanese soldiers were surrendering.
For the Japanese command though, this was intentional, they wanted the U.S. to kill surrendering troops because they didn’t want their troops to surrender in the first place.
It's literally not perfidy lol. Words have meanings. I think OP was just confused on that one.
Edit: Gotta correct myself and mention that you can't really fault people like OP. Even the Wiki article about perfidy features the Trojan Horse as an example. It's just a societal misinterpretation of an ancient story.
In the original Odyssey, the greeks feign a retreat (or, more accurately, pretend to lose interest in the cause and just leave), not a surrender, and the wooden horse is left behind as an offering to the gods for safe travels. The Greeks anticipate the Trojans taking the offering as a way to disrespect their retreating foes, and thereby infiltrate the city.
It's a Ruse de Guerre not perfidy, but even Wiki is confused about that.
My whole thing with it is whether the surrender is intended to lure the capturing forces into a situation where they can be attacked. The Trojan horse is definitely not that. I'd need to look up the Star Wars examples, but I recall those being more varied. I recall some being a distraction or to buy time, which would be perfidy I think. Others were more like the Trojan horse, surrender to infiltrate a base or get info.
Also, they were fighting droids. Droid sentience and how it relates to war crimes is a separate debate, but if you do consider them machines and know they are easy to confuse with complex tactics like that shrugs shoulders why not use that advantage.
IRL: Quarterback Kenny Pickett did a fake slide in college and scored a Touchdown from it.
For the non-American football fans, when a quarterback runs with the ball, he can opt to slide - basically giving himself up so the other team doesn't tackle him. It's done so that the quarterback (who is typically not a runner) doesn't risk injury from a big hit, since he's the player who the offense revolves around.
Pickett basically faked like he was surrendering himself so that the defense stopped trying to tackle him and then he used that to continue running and scored. Reactions were pretty mixed, with a lot of people thinking it was a genius heads-up play. I personally thought it was a dick move that would cause other quarterbacks to get hurt since the defense would second guess themselves.
IIRC they changed the rules to ban this play shortly after for the reasons I mentioned.
I think Patrick Mahomes has engaged in this, to a sense. He uses the boundary to pretend like he's going to step out, forcing the D to let up so as not to get a roughing penalty. Then he darts upfield instead.
He's going to get himself killed when someone takes the calculated risk and slams him while he's trying to feint.
He’s done it so long, I’m always surprised an opposing team doesn’t just sign a Burfict-type player and tell him to go ham on Mahomes when he does that. All it takes is one.
Almost every ‘clever strategy’ in stories are just war crimes.
Disguising yourself as the enemy, fake surrender, poisoning the food supplies. Using medical and religious institutions and vehicles for combat purposes.
Always just war crimes.
In fact the real life CIA even had a rule against certain disguises during foreign undercover missions because the risk of eroding trust is too high.
The CIA will never (well, they say they will never) hire/use anyone that was formerly part of the peace corps and the peace corps won't take people who served in the CIA
In 2011, the CIA ran a fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan as a cover for intelligence operations, which severely fractured public trust in healthcare professionals and fueled widespread vaccine rejection. This enduring suspicion, along with subsequent militant attacks on medical workers, remains a primary reason why polio has still not been fully eradicated in the country.
The restrictions you are talking about are governed by internal directives rather than an absolute statutory ban, and it permits high-level exceptions.
A US government agency abandoning its few principles in the aftermath of 9/11 as part of the "War on Terror" and causing an erosion of trust, general disillusionment, and blowback? Boy, I sure hope that isn't part of some larger, society-eroding pattern!
That scene from Star Wars from the screenshot is actually perfect to show WHY it’s a war crime. Because the tactic droid immediately says "he's faking it, kill him"
Im pretty sure there’s no Geneva Convention in space or in ancient times
Edit: To be honest, this wasn’t supposed to be a serious comment, just a play on “they can’t violate the Geneva Convention because it doesn’t exist” though I do now know of it’s equivalent, Yavin Code, so I learned something from this
I don't know, Star Wars definitely has some equivalent set of agreed upon rules. I distinctly remember a scene in The Clone Wars where Anakin suggests something, another character tells him it would be a war crime, and Anakin goes "well, not technically."
The Geneva convention isn't what makes it immoral; it just codifies it in a way that a community of nations can recognize it and maybe enforce it.
Perdify is awful because it punishes mercy and makes it risky. In a conflict where it's commonly used, executing prisoners and/or civilians and/or surrendering/downed enemies becomes the practical and winning move instead of senseless cruelty, because those surrendering soldiers or women or children or terrified civilians have a real, demonstrated chance of turning out to be ambushers just waiting for you to let your guard down so they can stab you in the back.
You see this frequently in real-life conflicts. Small insurgent/resistance groups, as well as certain nations, who aren't willing to follow the "rules of war" (whether they're mentioned in the Geneva conventions or otherwise) lead to horrific conflicts where atrocities and crimes against humanity are common on both sides, because hesitation to be brutal becomes a losing move.
Even in sci fi or fantasy, things like "don't shoot the messenger/diplomat" (otherwise being willing to try to communicate/negotiate becomes a losing move), "don't attack medics" (otherwise helping the harmless wounded becomes a losing move), "don't use child soldiers" (otherwise mercy for children becomes a losing move), "don't use human shields" (otherwise mercy for civilians/noncombatants becomes a losing move" are things any "good guys" should be holding themselves to, and that includes "don't fake surrender" (otherwise acceptance of surrender/mercy for defeated forces becomes a losing move).
Its not about morality or legality. As OP explained doing this means eliminating the possibility of a peaceful surrender in the future.
How is an enemy supposed to trust you if your army frequently pretends to surrender before going for the kill? The only safe solution now is to just execute everyone even when they are at your mercy.
Exactly. Perfidy has been understood to be a war crime since long before the Geneva Conventions. It's not a war crime because the law says it is. It's a war crime because reciprocity is a thing that exists in human behavior.
Put simply, you want the enemy to trust that your surrenders are honest, because if they don't, then they stop accepting surrenders. And then if you are on the losing side, they just massacre every person on the losing side to the last man, on the assumption that by doing so, they are preventing you from double-crossing them. You want the option to surrender and survive the war even if you are on the losing side? Narrator's note: you absolutely do want that. Well, then it is in your interest to rigorously enforce rules about perfidy on your own side, and rigorously punish violations of perfidy by everyone who commits it.
That's how war crimes work. You don't need a legal code and an international tribunal to make it work. You just need both sides to understand the concept of Prisoner's Dilemma.
Yeah people who think that war crimes and crimes against humanity were somehow discovered in the XX century in a town named Geneva or by an organization called the United Nations are just flat out wrong on every level.
Rules of engagement, what it means to be an honorable soldier or warrior and the meaning of "just" war were discussed as long as humans existed and fought each other (so basically forever).
It makes plenty of sense for a "Geneva convention" to exist in basically every setting, be it fantasy or Sci-Fi. It won't be called that and it might not even be codified or written down but it's definitely there.
Just because it isn't an official crime doesn't mean it's perfectly fine. All war crimes became that for a reason, and those consequences would logically still happen in any setting, even if it's not something the story would ever cover
Its not wrong because its illegal, its illegal because its wrong. People understood the problems with perfidy before the geneva conventions were a thing they just didn't have a formal agreement that it was to be off the table for everyone.
in defense of star wars, while the scene was used humoursly, it also served to show the watchers that something is seriously wrong with anakin even from that point (even as a kid, i didnt like that scene at all) and the others did seem reluctant to go with it.
Technically on Krystophis Obi wan offering a truce to discuss the terms of his surrender. Ob-Wan was asking completely reasonable questions like how will my men be treated; what about the wounded?
Yes, he was stalling for time, but that's allowed. Every other time they did it was definitely a war crime, but Obi-Wan is in the clear for that one.
In the Clone Wars CGI movie, Obi-Wan uses the same tactic to lure General Loathsom (who despite his hilariously on-the-nose name is actually very respectful and honorable) into a fake surrender meeting to distract him from Anakin ans Ahsoka from disabling his army's shield...only to then immediately take him hostage and threaten his life.
And then in a later episode Kenobi had the gall to pontificate about how Tarkin's in the wrong and that the Jedi need to be careful about losing their honor by going too far in the war.
Master, you jettisoned your honor out the air lock during your series' movie premiere.
Odysseus is many thing, some of them good, hero is not one of them.
Perhaps not according to our modern understanding of the term, but according to the classical definition of what a hero was in Ancient Greece, Odysseus IS a hero, though not a ‘good person’.
Nah, irrc, even then, Odyssyes was always considered a shifty guy.
Brutality was a valor people revered, but not deceiving.
People were proud to declare themselves descendants of Achilles, Ajax and even Hector. Heracles, brutal as he was, was basically all the greek cities's favorite "super hero", everyone said they came from him (and thus Zeus).
Ody was the guy you are happy was on your side, you didn't go around saying he was your great grandfather. People wouldn't trust you if you were proud of that.
Also, if you fought a war for 10 years with no progress for no other reason then your friend getting cucked and you're only there because of a promise you made to said friend as a teen, honor tends to go down on your list of priorities.
Also at the time of the clone wars, Anakin had already massacred an entire tribe of sand people. He's really not concerned about committing serious crimes, is barely hanging on to the title of 'good guy' and that's kind of the point.
In one of the exotic missions from Destiny 2, you as the players are captured by a group of enemy aliens known as the Fallen (or Eliksni, in their own tongue). You are forced to hold down the use button to "Surrender" your weapons, complete with quotes. Once you've been teleported by the Fallen into a holding cell, you are able to get your weapons teleported back to you. You then proceed to run rampant through the enemy ranks, slaughtering everything that moves through the rest of the mission.
Not the first time within the lore or story of Destiny that the topic of committing war crimes has been mentioned, but the first time it is an action taken by the player in such a brazen manner.
Tbf wouldn't that just be a jailbreak? I'd argue it's only a fake surrender if it's done to lower an enemy's guard and attack them before you are captured, whereas this situation is you allowing yourself to be captured, then breaking out of jail and running amok. The Eliksni don't gain reason to distrust all of the surrenders from the forces of the Last City, they only get taught to make their Guardian prisons more resilient.
the space geneva excuse is weak anyway cause the story still decides a fake surrender is a cool trick. perfidy isnt just cheating in one fight, it makes every real surrender afterward look like a trap. anakin pulling that and getting a little wink from the narrative is gross, even if the show is quietly telling us hes already sliding. and troy, sure nobody there is a saint, but that just means the clever ending is a bunch of bastards dunking on other bastards.
the star wars show already demonstrates it. They've done the fake surrender trick earlier in the series, and before the Separatists took it seriously, stopped firing, sent their general to talk terms and to assure the prisoners will be provided for and taken care of, just to get ambushed by the republic. When anakin did it again later in the series (the image OP pictured) exactly what you said happened, they tried to surrender, the droids stopped shooting momentarily to get their general, and the general said it was a trick and to kill them all.
Babylon 5, part of the backstory, later expanded upon in the TV film "In the Beginning" is the humans getting into a very one-sided war against the more advanced Minbari. The only victory the humans won until the end of the war was when Commander John Sheridan laid a minefield around his ship (already disabled due to a Minbari ambush they fell afoul of previously) and then send out a distress signal.
A Minbari warship, the Black Star, pride of the Minbari fleet, picked up the signal and closed in eager to finish off the helpless human ship. And then sailed into the minefield, resulting in the destruction of the Black Star. The Minbari took this personally and went on to refer to Sheridan as "Star Killer," although the human stance on the engagement was that it was a genuine distress call (the crew would die if not rescued), and the Black Star was not going to be picking up survivors based on past behavior.
A decade or so later, during the Shadow War, Sheridan, now leader of the Army of Light, is invited to the Shadow homeworld to seek out a peaceful solution. He suspects they aren't being on the level, and has rigged his ship with nuclear warheads. When his suspicions are verified, he sets off the nukes in his ship, blowing up the Shadow capital, which he was invited to under a flag of (false) truce.
Really, Sheridan is the poster child for heroes doing morally dubious things to win battles against significantly more powerful (and often untrustworthy) enemies.
I'm on Sheridan's side in both situations, and honestly don't even think either is morally dubious in the slightest, and no, not just because he's the show's hero (I think he handles Lyta and the telepath situation terribly, for example).
People in this thread have pointed out why perfidy is such a bad idea IRL. If your enemy thinks your surrender is fake, they will never accept surrender. But... the Minbari already don't! As you pointed out, they are deliberately hunting wounded survivors to finish them, and for no other reason than religious genocide. They will kill any human being that they can find, surrendering or not. So under those circumstances, commit perfidy all the livelong day.
For the other incident, Sheridan got confirmation from Franklin that Anna has been surgically altered just like the Shadow ships' pilots, something she never mentions or tells him. That already tells him the Shadows have no intention of actual, peaceful negotiations, and that John's death or brainwashing would be the only result of going to Z'ha'dum. If you already know the other party is going to ambush you at peace talks, then you've got no reason to treat their request as legitimate.
The Black Star incident is interesting specifically because it does get discussed from time to time. The other incident might be more interesting because the Shadows never seem to bring it up as a point of contention. Maybe they were impressed by the audacity.
The Trojan Horse was an "offering" the Greeks made to the gods for "good winds home" not a peace offering to Troy, Troy took it to try and screw over the Greeks one last time. Unfortunately for them the Greeks accounted for and planned around that pettiness.
To be fair to Frozone, its implied the Harmless Freezing trope is in full effect for his powers. The officer just needs a warm bath and he'll be right as rain.
My Greek mythology is pretty rusty, but iirc Nolan's take in The Odyssey is basically transposing modern values over a very different culture (with an eye toward making a modern political analogy, too). The Trojan Horse wasn't viewed by the people who listened to The Odyssey back in ancient Greece as perfidy, but as an example of the virtue of cleverness.
The gods weren't angry at Odysseus for breaking some assumption of trust and honesty, it was because he'd pissed them off some other way that I can't remember. In the original myth, Poseidon even sends a pair of serpents to kill a Trojan priest and his kids because they were about to uncover Odysseus's plan with the wooden horse, and that scares the Trojans enough that they decide to just accept it and don't examine it further.
In the original myth, it was a mix between odysseus blinding Polyphemus and talking shit like "aha, i have command the four winds, poseidon ain't shit" iirc
And he could have gotten away with it if not for ... checks notes ... doxing himself at the last possible moment because he couldn't stand someone he outsmarted not knowing that it was him.
Nolan's take is basically unrelated to the Odyssey's actual point.
The Horse was seen as cowardly, but extremely cunning; after ten years, the Achaean Greeks decided they were ok being cowardly to win the war and go home.
In the eyes of the Gods*, the Horse was justice for the Trojans (Paris) breaking the law of hospitality when he stole Helen away; what Odysseus did was only wrong because it was cowardly, not because it violated anything.
Later, Poseidon is specifically mad at Odysseus because Odysseus blinded Poseidon's son and bragged about it
* - the Gods were actually split on either side of the war, until Zeus sided with the Achaean Greeks over the Trojans and the pro-Trojan faction had to concede.
To be fair for the troy thing, it wasn't actually a surrender and instead them just exploiting the Troy's ego. They specifically said "this horse is for Athena and not for you" and yet they took it anyway and didn't think it was a trap until it was too late. (Plus, that happened THOUSANDS of years ago. Way before the Geneva conventions were a thing.)
Perfidy was also recognized as a war crime way before the Geneva Conventions were a thing, but the Geneva Conventions - actually Additional Protocol I to the GCs, basically an amendment to them decades later - put some of those pre-existing principles of the law of war, including the prohibition against perfidy, into a single document that basically every nation signed.
Basically, as long as signaling that you surrender has existed, doing so as a trick has been a war crime.
Part of the problem is what pop culture doesn't realize are war crimes. This is the most common one, but hostages, and sometimes relocation of civilian population and extensive damage not justified by military necessity aren't seen as war crimes as often. Yet heroes will take hostages to escape, and respecting property rights is frequently depicted as a bad thing.
It's been forever since I read the Iliad, but the Greeks didn't really fake surrender, they just feigned retreat and then infiltrated the city. Not perfidy.
900
u/Whole_Obligation_776 Sep 11 '26
Matthew McCleskey's War Crimes skit is hilariously showing the aftermath of 'multiple' war crimes of Anakin.
''We know how you Jedi Work, we know there is no surrender''
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db_Z7OfJWqI