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/Rude_Ice_4520 Sep 11 '26

The CIS is objectively way stronger as a military, and Palpatine basically had to handicap them so the war would stay roughly even.

33

u/Equivalent-Battle973 Sep 11 '26

Well yeah, You can only grow so many clones at once, while you can have several factories across the galaxy producing millions of battle droids.

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u/Rude_Ice_4520 Sep 11 '26

If you think about it, it's bizarre that their their entire army and navy came out of one training centre.

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u/jedisalamander Sep 12 '26

To be fair, I do believe there are multiple kaminoan cities where the cloning occurs, we just only see the main one

8

u/Holy-Wan_Kenobi Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26

There are also the Republic Judicial Forces, the Planetery Defense Forces, and various loyalists militias across the galaxy. The Grand Army was the Republic's spear, but the Reoublic wasn't solely reliant on clones.

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u/jedisalamander Sep 12 '26

Hell the GAR wasn't even entirely clones, as confirmed in Star Wars Zero Company: the player character is a former GAR commander, who led a Clone Company but wasn't a clone themselves