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/Icarium-Lifestealer Sep 11 '26

And yet the CIA abused a vaccination program to search for Bin Laden in Pakistan, leading to vaccination skepticism after it was revealed.

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u/a_wasted_wizard Sep 11 '26

A US government agency abandoning its few principles in the aftermath of 9/11 as part of the "War on Terror" and causing an erosion of trust, general disillusionment, and blowback? Boy, I sure hope that isn't part of some larger, society-eroding pattern!

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u/Llayanna Sep 11 '26

Maybe they had some anti-vaxxers in their rank?