Watchmen (comics)/Fridge: Difference between revisions

* I recently read through ''[[Watchmen (Comic Book)|Watchmen]]'', and was uncertain why exactly [[Alan Moore]] included the flashback scene where Jon is experimenting with a watch when his father comes in and throws it out, going on about how nuclear power was so much more important now. Initially I just thought it was an excuse for his turning to physics leading to the accident that made him Dr. Manhattan, but then I remembered something I covered in Religious Studies: William Paley's analogy of God as a watchmaker, whose existence is obvious by the complexity and purpose of his creation. Jon is admiring the complicated setup of a watch, and after becoming Dr. Manhattan he basically ''is'' God. Subtle, but brilliant. -- Roukan

** I also read through ''[[Watchmen (Comic Book)|Watchmen]]'' recently, and thoroughly analyzed it word for word. Then, as I went about and pondered over what I'd read, I was reminded about how Janie Slater's clock got stepped on by a fat man, and finally drew the (somewhat obvious) parallels between the fat man stepping on her watch and nuclear power "stepping" on Jon's future as a watchmaker. But more so I realized that while Jon did pursue a future as a physicist per his father's request, his transformation into Doctor Manhattan and subsequent insight into time inevitably brought him back to becoming a watchmaker whose almost godlike powers (in line with the God-Watchmaker parallel above) actually allows him to "step" on nuclear power and become a one-man nuclear deterrent all by himself, bringing the whole symbolism back full circle to when his father urged him to become a physicist. Jon never was a physicist. He was a [[Epileptic Trees|watchmaker all along]].

*** I read the comic, saw the movie, and then saw the movie again, and only then did I truly realize the point of Jon's flashback. The flashback happens for the most part in chronological order, but he still jumps around, and everything is in the present tense. John says a couple times that his perception of time is different, that he sees everything as happening at once. The way his flashback is told is shaky, as if he's struggling to tell it right. He's used to seeing time as everything-at-once, so he would naturally struggle to tell a chronological story. It also shows his internal struggle of whether he's Jon, the human, who sees time as a sequential thing, or Dr. Manhattan, the superman who sees time as being simultaneous. It's almost as if Jon is trying to rebel against Dr. Manhattan, trying to fight back against what he became, by trying to remember what he was, and the order it happened in. -[[Timber]]

*** A watchman can refer to a guard. It can also refer to a person who repairs watches. -- Kory K

*** And finally, the entire shaky grasp that Jon has on perceiving time {{spoiler|is foreshadowing for the ending, the shock of which relies on having the reader percieve two separate events that occur at two different times, simultaneously.}}- [[Rothul]]

*** And on a lesser extent, it also explains why he built that big weird glass thing on Mars in the style of a watch- in some ways it's a glass prison, an extension of his detachment from reality, and how his fatalism has led him to believe everyone just runs like clockwork. Silk Spectre breaking it... well, I think you can figure that one out.- [[Sabre Justice]]

*** People often wonder why Jon keeps the same personality, etc, etc, doesn't change sides from the US after he becomes Manhattan. It occurred to me: Manhattan is utterly a creature of physics. And Newton's First Law of physics is inertia: namely, that a body which is not acted on by an outside force will ''keep on doing what it was doing.'' -- Saintheart

* Another ''[[Watchmen (Comic Book)|Watchmen]]'' one: just as ''Watchmen'' had themes that almost no other superhero comics had, so does ''Tales of the Black Freighter'' with pirate comics. Thus, "Tales" is the in-universe ''Watchmen''! -- Alcatrazz

*** You have just entered the zone of [[Internet Backdraft]].

*** This isn't my Brilliance, but one of {{spoiler|Adrian's}} last lines is {{spoiler|"By night, I dream of swimming toward a hideous... but that's not important."}}, paralleling the pirate comic even more explicitly (and [[Nightmare Fuel|creepily]]).

**** This leads to yet even more Fridge Brilliance. Why would Ozymandias, undoubtedly one of the smartest people on the planet, fail to realize the irony of naming himself after a man who, for all his accomplishments, was doomed to fail in the end, all he ever achieved disappearing with time? He knew all about the man's history, why didn't he pick up on that? Simple: Ozymandias, just like his namesake, suffers from extreme narcissism and drastic overconfidence. Just how the original Alexander overlooked the possibility of ultimate failure due to all his talent and intellect, Ozymandias fails to realize the parallel between Alexander's ultimate failure and the possibility of his own plans failing because he doesn't recognize the same flaws in himself that Alexander the Great suffered from. The same qualities that make Ozymandias admire his namesake so much are the same ones that prevent him from seeing that he inherited the same basic weaknesses as well.

**** Ironically, I came to just the ''opposite'' degree of Brilliance when it came to Ozy's name. Adrian realizes he's the best, he's the brightest, he has all the best plans and everything is going his way with hardly any visible effort. He conquers (metaphorically) the known world. He comes up with a plan that, while horrific, will unify the entire world, and it ''works.'' Then he gets called out on it that it's at best a stop-gap, a band-aid on the sucking chest wound that is humanity's self-destructive nature. Rather than rage at such a notion, he ''admits the possibility.'' Adrian doesn't miss his own faults, he KNOWS them. So he either specifically took on the name knowing his faults, he specifically took it on to prove he could OVERCOME those faults unlike Alexander, or maybe it was one big in-universe [[Take That]] at folks who didn't look past the surface of things. After all, most folks have heard some rendition of the whole "Look upon my works" epitaph, but have [[Viewers are Morons|no idea]] that it was an ironic-in-hindsight statement that was all that remained of the base of a ruined, forgotten structure.