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/Helios_Synthesis Sep 11 '26

RIP to all the Jedi and Clones that got fucking executed on the spot because of Ani lol

269

u/Deep90 Sep 11 '26

The Clones weren't taking prisoners on Umbara and Geonosis either.

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u/Dinasnore Sep 11 '26

They did take at least one prisoner on Umbara, as we see with Luco Bronc in Zero Company. So they probably did take Umbarans prisoner. We just never saw a scene where they actually surrendered I don’t think

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u/Deep90 Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26

There is one scene where an umbaran has his mask broken and seems to be begging for his life, but is shot in the head execution style (by rex?).

You're right though. They did capture Luco, but his capture seems more intentional as a way free Dozen since the sepertists didn't greenlight the exchange. Rhy Cesca made an exception solely because she was Lucos lover.Perhaps other Umbarans were also captured, but I haven't seen anything to go off of.

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u/Various-Storm991 Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 12 '26

It Was Actually Fives Who Did That, Though There Is a Scene Where Rex Double-Taps a Umbaran That Felt Out Of his Vehicle After One Of the Clones Destroys the Glass With a Rocket Launcher.

2

u/OHFTP Sep 12 '26

We also learn in Zero Company from Luco that if the helmet breaks while they are amped up on the stim/gas they start to asphyxiate. So maybe that's what going on and ita a mercy kill. Seems like a stretch, though.

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u/Deep90 Sep 12 '26

Wait really? I don't remember him saying that.

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u/OHFTP Sep 12 '26

I think it was a walk by conversation between him and one of my non-named operators. Don't remember which personality.

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u/NanolathingStuff Sep 12 '26

Unrelated, but i've always found funny that Umbarans needed masks to survive on their own planet but clones could breath just fine

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u/Deep90 Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26

In Zero Company, it's actually explained that the masks contain a combat stimulant, not air.

I think a tabletop game or something also does the same.

1

u/LX575-EEE Sep 15 '26

They took a bunch of prisoners on Umbara. We see them at the Air Base the 501st capture

3

u/Illesbogar Sep 12 '26

I don't think anyone in SW respects geonosians as intelligent beings

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u/Deep90 Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26

Maybe not geonosians, but especially the recently released zero company is recognizing that Umbara was pretty evil of them.

-5

u/XrnivraY Sep 11 '26

Bugs and droids don't count.

10

u/Deep90 Sep 11 '26

Umbarans are people.

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u/NplnBnrFrt Sep 11 '26

Geonosians are a sentient race as well, with families. People like Ki Adi Mundi committed atrocities all the same, after discovering this.

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/arisubabe Sep 11 '26

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u/Mummiskogen Sep 11 '26

The geneva SUGGESTION

58

u/Femcel_Bambi Sep 11 '26

Come my child soldiers!

22

u/Kamen_master1988 Sep 11 '26

Given that the clones rapidly grow “we can grow them in about half the time” they are quite literally bred for war child soldiers.

11

u/Jedal_1 Sep 11 '26

I love clowns!

1

u/Leprosy_Disease Sep 11 '26

Full Metal Jacket!

16

u/ihavewaytoomanyminis Sep 11 '26

You leave the Canadians out of this.

1

u/zrice03 Sep 11 '26

Star Wars Universe: "What's Geneva? Do they have Falcons on that planet?"

1

u/ZealousidealComb7891 Sep 11 '26

The Geneva Checklist...

30

u/2leftf33t Sep 11 '26

I’m going to commit various warcrimes!

7

u/ButterflyLife4655 Sep 11 '26

Chopper and R2: get in, loser, we're committing war crimes

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u/Hopeful_Video_3803 Sep 11 '26

"No i said war CRY"

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u/2leftf33t Sep 11 '26

Oh! IM GOING TO COMMIT VARIOUS WARCRIMES!!!

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u/Hopeful_Video_3803 Sep 11 '26

ILL BE WANTED IN EVERY COUNTRY

20

u/UnDeadPuff Sep 11 '26

Ani ready to spread his mustard gas.

8

u/Odd_Cartoonist7433 Sep 11 '26

What about his french dressing gas?

10

u/UnDeadPuff Sep 11 '26

Fr*nch? Not sure the galaxy is ready for that kind of war crime.

2

u/Odd_Cartoonist7433 Sep 11 '26

So no french dressing gas?

4

u/UnDeadPuff Sep 11 '26

No, we're all out of french dressing sauce for the gas machine.

5

u/Odd_Cartoonist7433 Sep 11 '26

Daagh that's the one I wanted... Guess I'll huff this dry then...

5

u/MOVES_HYPHENS Sep 11 '26

To be fair, the Geneva Checklist doesn't exist yet in the Star Wars setting

3

u/Thewhimsicalsteve Sep 11 '26

To be fair, the Geneva Convention happens way way after the Clone Wars or the Trojan War.

2

u/EscapedFromArea51 Sep 11 '26

The Geneva checklist

6

u/Usful Sep 11 '26

The Geonosis Convention?

1

u/SenritsuJumpsuit Sep 11 '26

The Jedi long before film era sided with heartless mantis things that lied inorder to avoid being stopped from making another species extinct, many civilians perished because of this all because over the thousands of years post Sith War the Senate was rotting and ensnaring the Jedi Order as a resource that hardly questions their bosses.

1

u/Classiclevine Sep 11 '26

So, the Geneva Check-list?

1

u/link3945 Sep 11 '26

Geneva conventions are more of a guideline for Anakin.  Chopper, though, treats them like a checklist.

1

u/certainlynotdio Sep 11 '26

You mean the Yavin code?

1

u/ZealousidealComb7891 Sep 11 '26

Wait... he's space canadian ?

72

u/NaiveFilm6366 Sep 11 '26

Sadly the CIS is so neutered in the show they're physically incapable of winning to get to that point

48

u/Rude_Ice_4520 Sep 11 '26

The CIS is objectively way stronger as a military, and Palpatine basically had to handicap them so the war would stay roughly even.

35

u/Equivalent-Battle973 Sep 11 '26

Well yeah, You can only grow so many clones at once, while you can have several factories across the galaxy producing millions of battle droids.

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u/Rude_Ice_4520 Sep 11 '26

If you think about it, it's bizarre that their their entire army and navy came out of one training centre.

18

u/jedisalamander Sep 12 '26

To be fair, I do believe there are multiple kaminoan cities where the cloning occurs, we just only see the main one

6

u/Holy-Wan_Kenobi Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26

There are also the Republic Judicial Forces, the Planetery Defense Forces, and various loyalists militias across the galaxy. The Grand Army was the Republic's spear, but the Reoublic wasn't solely reliant on clones.

3

u/jedisalamander Sep 12 '26

Hell the GAR wasn't even entirely clones, as confirmed in Star Wars Zero Company: the player character is a former GAR commander, who led a Clone Company but wasn't a clone themselves

1

u/falconfarfromhome Sep 12 '26

Also helps when, for some reason, the Republic still lets openly separatist aligned corporations continue to operate in Republic space, work with Republic planets and essentially siphon away Republic money because of Corporate Neutrality

1

u/Stupid_Jackal Sep 11 '26

It really wasn’t. The CIS had a lot of droids but between the mammoth differences in economy, manpower, and industrial capabilities, combined with the largely combat ineffectiveness of needing overwhelming numbers to win against the GAR, the Separatists were always doomed to lose in the long run.

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u/Theangelawhite69 Sep 11 '26

Little did he know, he was planning ahead

4

u/oForce21o Sep 11 '26

order 66: the prequel

3

u/popular_in_populace Sep 11 '26

Also RIP to the ones he executed himself lol

1

u/StevePalpatine Sep 12 '26

Considering who he became, I'd say that's the least of his crimes

1

u/Initial-Length-9791 Sep 13 '26

I love how people are slowly realizing how much damage Filoni’s garbage has done to completely destroy the prequels world building and setting. Just a bunch of plotlines and scenes based purly off of “wouldn’t it be cool if…” without ever actually thinking about the ramifications that scene may have on the rest of the setting.

1

u/Vanko_Babanko Sep 14 '26

the price for breaching the rules of war..