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.
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u/Paleodraco Sep 11 '26
My whole thing with it is whether the surrender is intended to lure the capturing forces into a situation where they can be attacked. The Trojan horse is definitely not that. I'd need to look up the Star Wars examples, but I recall those being more varied. I recall some being a distraction or to buy time, which would be perfidy I think. Others were more like the Trojan horse, surrender to infiltrate a base or get info.
Also, they were fighting droids. Droid sentience and how it relates to war crimes is a separate debate, but if you do consider them machines and know they are easy to confuse with complex tactics like that shrugs shoulders why not use that advantage.