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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194

u/[deleted] Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

70

u/AporiaParadox Sep 11 '26

This is when Beast started getting a taste for genocide.

2

u/Free_For__Me Sep 12 '26

Oof. I’m not sure I’ll ever come back around on Beast after that. 

15

u/Winter-Cow-6208 Sep 11 '26

Awful writing and even worse art. What the hell is this? 

2

u/TheRadishGolem Sep 12 '26

I can barely tell what's going on

8

u/transmogrify Sep 11 '26

Cyclops would of course obey the laws governing armed conflict... NOT!

3

u/Big-Recognition7362 Sep 12 '26

Do Sentinels even count as enemy combatants, since they’re non-sapient robots?

1

u/transmogrify Sep 12 '26

(That sounds like mutie propaganda... NOT!)

I guess the authorities would have to arrest Cyclops first, and then prove the charge of perfidy in a military court. And Cyclops' lawyer could then argue that he is innocent because perfidy is not a crime against Sentinels (being robots) or against Friends of Humanity (being domestic terrorists). I don't know. Realistically, if a human court wanted to put Cyclops behind bars, he has committed lots of crimes that they could convict him for.