Basic Trope: Characters in a conflict can't tell who's on their side.
- Straight: Characters shoot at, or avoid, their own friends, or allies.
- Exaggerated: Characters Shoot Everything That Moves even though they know they have friends about.
- Downplayed: Characters hold their gun to the other's face, but don't shoot.
- Justified: As in Real Life, the Fog of War can make it very hard to tell.
- Inverted: The Medic with the Healing Shiv wants to shoot only his friends, but finds it hard to tell which ones.
- Subverted: Uniforms make it clear.
- Double Subverted: Until Dressing as the Enemy occurs.
- Parodied:
- Characters are baffled in a paintball fight — where the balls shoot Instant Allegiance Artifact.
- Both sides are wearing either pink or orange uniforms amid a dull background, and characters still get them mixed up.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: Friendly Fire Proof
- Enforced: "We don't want to glamorize war, so let's depict battles as gritty, confusing scenes where the hero can't even recognize his best friends."
- Lampshaded: A character asks "Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him?"
- Invoked: The enemy deliberately misinforms soldiers about spies being in their ranks, designating comrades of theirs as The Mole.
- Exploited: One character is The Mole, who takes advantage of the confusion of battle to murder a target.
- Defied: Both sides are color-coded.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: The characters have been rendered so paranoid by war that they can't tell who is who anymore.
- Reconstructed: That's because of how hard it is to detect.
Back to Friend or Foe?, scumbag! Or I'll-oh! Sorry, sir! Thought you were one of them, y'see..
