r/TopCharacterTropes • u/AporiaParadox • Sep 11 '26

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

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  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.

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u/keelanbarron Sep 11 '26

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.)

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u/stubbazubba Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26

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.

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u/Adorable-Response-75 Sep 11 '26

Plus, that happened THOUSANDS of years ago. Way before the Geneva conventions were a thing.

It didn’t happen at all. It’s a fictional story.

But regardless, that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, which is about the morality of said actions. Not whether they violate the Geneva convention. 

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u/jaggervalance Sep 11 '26

The point is if it's perfidy or not.

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u/Gamer_G33k17 Sep 11 '26

Pretty sure it was for Poseidon. They left an offering of his sacred animal for safe passage, and I think the Trojans stole it to offer it to Athena.

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u/NerdHoovy Sep 11 '26

They didn’t just put the horse there and where done. They packed up everything and left with all the ships, tents and soldiers. Which is a universal signal of ending combat. Which while not ‘technically’ a false surrender, would reasonably be read as such by most and therefore would be one, especially since it is assumed to be read that way

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u/jaggervalance Sep 11 '26

A fake retreat to lure the enemy is a perfectly acceptable tactic, used by pretty much any army on Earth.