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
- 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.
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u/Fly-the-Light Sep 11 '26
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.