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.
12.3k
Upvotes
218
u/The_Late_Arthur_Dent Sep 11 '26
IRL: Quarterback Kenny Pickett did a fake slide in college and scored a Touchdown from it.
For the non-American football fans, when a quarterback runs with the ball, he can opt to slide - basically giving himself up so the other team doesn't tackle him. It's done so that the quarterback (who is typically not a runner) doesn't risk injury from a big hit, since he's the player who the offense revolves around.
Pickett basically faked like he was surrendering himself so that the defense stopped trying to tackle him and then he used that to continue running and scored. Reactions were pretty mixed, with a lot of people thinking it was a genius heads-up play. I personally thought it was a dick move that would cause other quarterbacks to get hurt since the defense would second guess themselves.
IIRC they changed the rules to ban this play shortly after for the reasons I mentioned.