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/KitaharaKazusa1 Sep 12 '26

Yeah, if Bond gets captured he's just going to be executed anyway, even if he was working against a legitimate government and not a movie villain he'd still have zero protections, but that also means he isn't really bound by any laws or conventions

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u/Xerxes457 Sep 14 '26

Yeah isn’t this like, the state will deny his existence and he will be left alone without support if he is caught?

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u/KitaharaKazusa1 Sep 14 '26

They'll admit he exists, they'll just pretend like he was a rogue agent acting on his own initiative using his own resources and that the British government had nothing to do with his mission.

Therefore he will be tried under the laws of the country he was captured in, and since espionage is pretty much always a death sentence, he will probably be executed.