Basic Trope: The good guys are shown committing a war crime to show the absence of Black-and-White Morality.
- Straight: Private Henry is part of the The Troperitan Royal Army and is fighting a war against The Dark Khanate. After one battle, Private Henry notices that some of the corpses on the battlefield are Khanate civilians.
- Exaggerated:
- General Miller orders his division of The TRA to kill every single enemy soldier they come across. This war has only villanous sides, with the Troperitan Kingdom being less evil than The Dark Khanate because they don't rape or enslave or commit cannibalism the way the Khanate does.
- Private Henry decides that, since he's already crossed the Moral Event Horizon, he might as well start mowing down civilians on purpose.
- Downplayed:
- The TRA does not tolerate rape, the execution of civilians, or the mistreatment of POWs. However it is more than willing to use chemical weapons and hollow point bullets against enemies who won't surrender.
- The TRA engages in conduct which is unsporting and brutal but not technically a war crime. For instance shooting at fleeing unarmed but non-surrendering soldiers.
- The TRA captures members of The Dark Khanate's brutal death squads and has them summarily executed. No one feels sorry for them, but a few insist that they should have at least stood trial.
- Justified:
- The only time the TRA commits a war-crime is when they summarily execute 100,000 POWs. However this is a case of Pay Evil unto Evil as those POWs all came from an enemy regiment known for committing every war crime in the book. Not a single POW executed that day was innocent and would be hanged for war crimes anyway.
- The TRA had just came across a death camp. The travesties within made hardened soldiers not unfamiliar with war and its horrors refuse to accept surrender of those responsible.
- The TRA is actually a mercenary corp, meaning that they're unbound by the laws and customs of war and they can get away with committing war crimes. More sympathetically they know they weren't under their protection so see no need to reciprocate.
- The TRA knows full well that they're committing war crimes, but they believe that avenging their friends is more important than obeying the laws and the laws have no say in the matter of doing what's right.
- Inverted:
- Private Henry comes across a refugee camp/hospital run by enemy soldiers who treat allies and enemies indiscriminately.
- Private Henry is a reluctant soldier, knows how terrible war always gets, and has well-justified doubts that war can ever be truly necessary - but when he sees the war crimes committed by the enemy side, he realizes that sadly, in this case war is the only real answer, even with all the horrors it involves.
- Subverted:
- Private Henry is shocked when they open fire on a group of women and children ... and is even more shocked when they explode. It turns out the TRA had magnetic detection goggles that revealed they were really disguised robots/suicide bombers and were wired to explode.
- The TRA shoot children... who were shooting at them. Horrifying but not a war crime on their part.
- Double Subverted:
- Except when they shoot robots that were sapient and they did so when they didn't have explosives.
- The child soldiers were obviously whiffing their shots in hopes of a truce, but the TRA ignored that and kept shooting.
- Parodied:
- Private Henry's comrades pee on the enemy POWs. Henry is disgusted.
- Some of the TRA staff voice their refusal to commit a war crime when an order comes down to interrogate the enemy officers for information by using LeRoy Neiman paintings.
- In a satirical war movie, Private Henry's squad mercilessly shoots a group of enemy soldiers as they attempt to surrender, and when Henry rightfully calls them out on it, they respond that they really, really didn't want the movie to come off like it glorifies war.
- Zig Zagged: Private Henry's comrades consider slaughtering the enemy civilians, but can't go through with it. Then orders come in from up high to take no prisoners.
- Averted:
- The Troperitan Royal Army doesn't commit any war crimes.
- The TRA does commit war crimes, but it goes completely unmentioned.
- Enforced:
- The TRA has come across as Unintentionally Unsympathetic to the audience, so the producers decide to canonize the dark side that the fans believed exist.
- The TRA really did commit those crimes. Excluding them would be outright historical revisionism.
- Implied: A Khanate man describes horrors done to him by the TRA. It's not clear if he's telling the truth.
- Lampshaded: "And then I saw my own army gunning down women and children! I couldn't watch. It was like something out of a movie."
- Invoked: The Token Evil Teammate of the TRA suggests in a meeting that the TRA would be justified in extreme action against the Khanate.
- Exploited: The Dark Khanate uses the war crime as propaganda to rally civilians and neutral nations to their banner.
- Defied: "Put the gun down Private! He surrendered!"
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Private Henry is so horrified by his army's inhumanity that he defects to the enemy nation.
- Reconstructed: The brutality of the war leads humanity to a collective My God, What Have I Done? moment, causing everyone to take greater steps to prevent this sort of thing in the future.
- Played for Laughs: The Troperitan Royal Army commits a bunch of completely ridiculous war crimes by accident, in a grand display of not so much "Armies Are Evil" as "Armies Are Stupid".
- Played for Drama: The story is about Private Henry and his friends getting traumatized and driven to evil by the war crimes committed by both sides, culminating in them committing a series of war crimes themselves after they witness the hostile army committing genocide and decide that they've had enough.
- Played for Horror: The cycle of tit-for-tat war crimes eventually escalates to entire cities and countries being wiped out by Weapons of Mass Destruction and millions of people dying horribly, as to show/remind the audience why we have the Geneva Conventions in the first place and what they are meant to prevent.
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