"Good guys" committing perfidy (fake surrender) and it's treated as a clever heroic ploy instead of a war crime or something morally dubious

[u/AporiaParadox]

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.

[u/Arctic_The_Hunter]

And even if they were, Odysseus is very much meant to be morally ambiguous, to the point that the Odyssey ends with Athena (goddess of everything he’s good at basically) having to show up in-person to tell everybody he’s chill.

The Greek concept of a hero was basically just someone who did incredibly impressive deeds, usually with the Gods’ favor, not someone who was actually heroic by today’s standards.

[u/MyPhoneIsNotChinese → u/[deleted]]

I mean the whole point of Heracles was him having to redeem himself after his "anger bursts"

[u/NoodleIskalde → u/MyPhoneIsNotChinese]

Weren't they not even his fault? Wasn't it Hera being a petty child?

[u/Tahxeol → u/NoodleIskalde]

Oedipus was punished for a crime that was prophecised and that he did everything in his power to prevent. Guilt never mattered