10 Nov 6th Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: ‘I’m the Same as You’ – Conceptualising Confession, Perfidy and the Timing of Treachery Through Attack on Titan
[Himani Jha is currently working as a Research Associate specialising in Public International Law and International Criminal Law at National Law University Delhi, India.
Dr. Garima Tiwari is an Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Public International Law Centre at National Law University Delhi, India.]
“I’m the same as you.” — Eren Yeager to Reiner Braun, Liberio
At Fort Slava, a girl in a Marleyan uniform climbs out of cover and walks towards an enemy trench with her hands raised. The enemy soldiers hold their fire. Gabi Braun then throws the grenades tied to her ankle, destroying the gun emplacement and clearing the way for the armoured train behind her. Attack on Titan (AOT) opens its final season with a textbook case of perfidy, and then spends the rest of the series making it complicated.
AOT is a story about two (ethnic) groups of people, the Eldians and the Marleyans, and about nine Titans that can be inherited by Eldian human beings who transform at will. Legal writing on the series has mostly followed the genocide debate, which reads AOT as a study in mass atrocity. Watch the battles instead, and it becomes a study in deception: almost every operation that matters is won by an infiltration, a disguise, or a lie about who is standing in front of you.
This post takes three of those operations and runs them against the war crime of treacherous killing under Article 8(2)(b)(xi) of the Rome Statute, together with the perfidy and ruse provisions in Articles 37 and 39 of Additional Protocol I and customary Rules 57 and 65. The three sit in a line. Gabi never reveals herself. Eren reveals himself to one man. Reiner and Bertholdt reveal themselves to the very soldiers they are about to attack. Somewhere along that line perfidy is supposed to turn into a lawful ruse, and the law is remarkably unclear about where.
Hands Raised at Fort Slava
Start with Gabi, because hers is the easy case. Article 37(1) of Additional Protocol I prohibits killing, injuring or capturing an adversary by resort to perfidy: acts that invite his confidence that he is entitled to, or obliged to accord, protection under international humanitarian law, with intent to betray that confidence. The first illustration the provision gives is the feigning of surrender. Gabi walks towards the trench with her hands up; the soldiers lower their guard because Article 41 obliges them to spare anyone who has clearly expressed an intention to surrender; and she kills them with the forbearance she has just bought.
The Elements of Crimes ask whether the perpetrator invited that confidence, intended to betray it, killed or injured such person or persons, and made use of the confidence in doing so. All of it is there: the confidence is invited by a recognised protective signal, the victims are the soldiers who extended it, and the betrayal follows at once, as The Legal Geeks concluded in 2021. Nothing is withheld, qualified or confessed. That Gabi is a child raises problems of its own, under Article 8(2)(b)(xxvi) and Article 26 of the Statute, which are not dealt with here.
A Confession in the Basement
Eren’s infiltration of Liberio is the same crime done differently. He enters Marley’s internment zone as a wounded Eldian veteran of its war, living under the name Kruger, maimed and dependent on others for small tasks. The deception runs for months and is aimed at everyone around him. Then, in a basement beneath the festival, he finds Reiner Braun, tells him they are the same, regrows the limbs he never lost and transforms, killing and injuring soldiers and civilians gathered above.
Which illustration in Article 37(1) fits this situation is contestable. Eren does not feign civilian status in the ordinary sense; he feigns incapacitation by wounds, because the belief he cultivates is that he is a man who cannot fight. He also, unlike Reiner and Bertholdt (who pretend to be Survey Corps soldiers), wears nothing belonging to the enemy’s army, only ordinary clothes and the armband every Eldian in the zone must wear. Article 39(2) and customary Rule 62 therefore never come into it: there is no enemy uniform or insignia to misuse. What his dress does instead is put him among the civilian population, which brings in the third illustration, the feigning of civilian status, which Rule 65 lists as perfidy when it is used to kill or injure. The armband complicates that, since Marley imposes the mark itself, and whether a status the enemy assigns can be feigned at all is a question Article 37(1)(c) does not answer. Either way, Eren invites protection twice over: as a wounded man, and as a civilian in a zone where nobody expects an attack.
The harder question is what the confession does. On one reading it turns the whole operation into something lawful. Article 37(2) permits ruses of war: acts meant to mislead an adversary or induce him to act recklessly, which break no rule of international humanitarian law and, crucially, do not invite his confidence in protection under that law. Camouflage, decoys, mock operations and misinformation are the examples given, and customary Rule 57 confirms that ruses are not prohibited. The line, then, does not run between clever deception and crude deception. It runs between a lie that exploits what the adversary does not know and a lie that exploits what the law obliges him to do.
On that line, Eren’s deception was never a ruse. What he traded on was not Marley’s ignorance of where he was, but its obligation to leave a wounded man alone, and telling someone afterwards cannot change what was practised before. The elements make this concrete: the perpetrator must kill or injure such person or persons whose confidence was invited, which ties the confidence to the people actually harmed. Those Eren injures believed in Kruger and were never told. Telling only Reiner cannot turn his deceptive actions into a ruse for others as well, because in their eyes the belief that shielded him was intact when he transformed.
So the question is not whether Eren confessed, but whether the protection he had been living under was still working when he struck. It plainly was. The soldiers had no reason to watch a maimed veteran, and their inattention was not carelessness: a wounded man of their own side is someone they are bound to leave alone, and Eren had spent months becoming exactly that person. That forbearance carried him to a spot no armed enemy could have reached, and the attack spent the advantage it had bought. On the elements of Article 8(2)(b)(xi), a perpetrator who uses the confidence he invited to kill or injure those who extended it commits treacherous killing, and Eren did exactly that when he injured and killed the soldiers after transforming in the basement.
Atop Wall Rose
If the difficulty at Liberio is who was told, the difficulty on Wall Rose is when. Reiner Braun and Bertholdt Hoover spend years inside Paradis as Marleyan infiltrators, enlisting as cadets, graduating into the Survey Corps and earning the trust of the soldiers around them. On top of the wall, Reiner says what he is. Bertholdt confirms it. Seconds later both transform, and the blast throws those same soldiers off the wall.
This time the announcement reaches everyone present, including those it injures, so the objection that sank Eren’s confession does not apply. Even so, it is hard to accept that two men who spent years in the uniform of the army they were attacking cured the deception by naming themselves in its final second. The uniform is the first reason. Article 39(2) prohibits using the uniforms of adverse parties while engaging in attacks, or in order to shield, favour, protect or impede military operations, and customary Rule 62 says much the same. Reiner and Bertholdt are still in Survey Corps uniform when they transform, and the announcement removes neither the uniform nor the years of advantage it bought.
There is a real precedent here, and an awkward one: the trial of Otto Skorzeny and nine others before a United States military court at Dachau in 1947. Skorzeny’s commandos crossed American lines in American uniform during the Ardennes offensive, charged with improper use of those uniforms by entering combat in them and treacherously firing on United States forces. The defence did not dispute that fighting in enemy uniform is unlawful; it argued that the men wore the uniforms only while approaching under cover of darkness and were to discard them once detected and fight under their true colours. That tracked the sources of the day: the United States Field Manual required enemy uniforms to be discarded before opening fire, while the position on wearing them to approach unrecognised was, as Valentine Jobst wrote three years before the Ardennes, unsettled. All ten were acquitted, though the court gave no reasons, and the commentary puts the result down largely to weak evidence.
Skorzeny marks the line Wall Rose straddles. The doctrine is about shedding the disguise before the shooting starts, and it assumes a gap in which the adversary sees an enemy soldier coming. Reiner and Bertholdt declare themselves but keep the uniform on, and the weapon arrives in the same breath as the words.
Which brings us to what perfidy actually protects. The wrong is not the lie, which the law tolerates as a ruse, but the use made of the adversary’s own compliance with the law. On the wall, the soldiers are standing within arm’s reach of two shifters because they believed them to be comrades, and that is not a position anyone can give up in the time it takes to say a sentence. If a revelation with no interval behind it were enough, any perfidy could be laundered by a shout at the moment of attack: Gabi could lower her hands, announce what she meant to do, and leave the gun crew exactly where they were. A revelation has to come early enough, and to the right people, to put the adversary back roughly where he would have stood had the deception never happened. On that test Gabi fails for want of any revelation, Eren because his went to only one man (while he injured and killed those who never heard the confession), and Reiner and Bertholdt because theirs came too late to act on.
Conclusion
None of this is idle. Ukrainian prosecutors opened an inquiry into a disputed incident of feigned surrender, and the misuse of ambulances and medical cover keeps recurring in contemporary operations. The argument in each case turns on the questions AOT dramatises: who was invited to trust, who was harmed, and what was said before the shooting started.
What makes these scenes worth the attention is how we receive them. Gabi’s raised hands, Eren’s months as Kruger, Reiner’s declaration: all of them are remembered as feats of nerve, and the series is hardly unusual in that. The Trojan Horse, treated in an earlier contribution to this symposium as a quintessential case of perfidy, is still taught as cunning rather than as a crime. Fiction files all of it under cleverness, and quietly collapses the distinction the law insists on, between the ruse that is permitted and the treachery that is a war crime. Camouflage, decoys and false radio traffic are lawful; the same imagination applied to a white flag, a wounded body or an enemy uniform is not, and nothing on the surface of the act tells an audience which it is watching. So long as the doctrine cannot say to whom a fighter must declare himself, and how long before he strikes, every one of these scenes can be defended by someone as a clever ruse, and the law goes on ceding the distinction to the storytellers.
It is also a corner of the law with very little decided authority behind it. No international court or tribunal appears ever to have convicted anyone of perfidy or treacherous killing; the ICTY, the ICTR and the ICC built their war crimes jurisprudence elsewhere, and the one trial anyone cites, Skorzeny, ended in acquittal without reasons. What fills the space is treaty text, military manuals, national legislation and the practice gathered under customary Rule 65, read through commentary. A prohibition this old and this widely accepted should not have to rest so heavily on material no bench has tested, and the price of that is visible here: the questions this post raises, who must be told and how long before the attack, have no authoritative answer to find. Until a case supplies one, argument is how the rule develops, and arguing it through a story millions of people have already watched is not the worst place to start.