"Good guys" committing perfidy (fake surrender) and it's treated as a clever heroic ploy instead of a war crime or something morally dubious

[u/AporiaParadox]

1. 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.
2. 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.

[u/NinjaOfOnion]

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 

[u/ProfessionalOven2311 → u/NinjaOfOnion]

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

[u/zefciu → u/ProfessionalOven2311]

And any system of war ethics that includes POW protection must also condemn perfidy. Otherwise it would be inconsistent.