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/Winter-Apartment-821 Sep 11 '26

It's interesting how people took it this way, that she was entirely in his head. 

Ya I interpreted it as Athena  taking on the form of the woman he watched killed infront of him. After all he didn't remember what happened/who we was until we did. 

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u/keelanbarron Sep 11 '26

Sure, but it's the fact that no one else could see her but him.

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u/Winter-Apartment-821 Sep 11 '26

I feel that's well within the power of a god.

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u/Lucky-Paperclip-1 Sep 11 '26

In the poem, she's often appearing as Mentor, the guy who was the mentor to Telemachus.

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u/n122333 Sep 11 '26

Iirc, dyonisus did this to drunks as a party trick.

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u/keelanbarron Sep 14 '26

Fair enough.

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u/thesierratide Sep 11 '26

It’s deliberately ambiguous

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u/Avalonians Sep 11 '26

There's several ways to think about it.

What the movie tries to show is the ambiguity. She could actually be Athena, she could be a PTSD hallucination, she could be metaphorical (not even an actual vision). That's one way.

Then there's the fact that Nolan chose to depict no other god at all. He didn't know how to keep it grounded and modern, while having gods and godlike power in full display. We see rituals and discrete magical tricks but there's no actual magical bursts and divine powers with flashes of light and whatnot. So if Zendaya is Athena, why not show any other god? This makes me think she's not Athena.

And finally there's knowing that it's a Nolan film and we know he just wants to make a bait and switch like he did with the people of the sea to make us go "omg the twist". What she is matters not, he did that for the sake of doing that.

All in all I think it's deliberately unclear, but if the whole movie is worse if you choose to think she's actually Athena imo.