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/the_Real_Romak Sep 11 '26

Also morality was different at the time. The concept of warcrimes did not exist, you either won or you lost, and losing often meant death.

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u/NwgrdrXI Sep 11 '26

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.

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u/iwantdatpuss Sep 11 '26

Iirc Odysseus is also the type of guy to avoid draft by pretending to be mad. He was a smart man, but he's not really "good" in our modern sense. 

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u/justareaderofnote Sep 11 '26

I know he was the one who set up the suitor draft thing but that was pretty understandable