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*** The aftermath is sort of, why, you know, they didn't ''kill'' Veidt. He's influential enough to try and prevent such eventualities from occuring.
*** And also, don't forget, Veidt is ''human''. He won't live forever, no matter how much he might want to. And since nothing ends, eventually when Veidt dies, well, things will probably go bad again. Veidt has succeeded in his plan, yes...''for now''. It ''can't'' continue forever, and it ''won't''. But he can't see that. And he won't until it's too late. All he's done is delay the inevitable.
**** The above point about Veidt being very short sighted is well-made, and has some support in that Veidt's idol is Alexander the Great: Alexander goes to Gordia to solve "the unsolvable riddle", which he does by cutting the Gordian Knot in
*** The way it read to me was that he not only made people scared of aliens, but he brainwashed the entire world into believing in the aliens, so there would be no need for a second attack. This is a flaw with the movie's version, since it would rely on subsequent attacks. It's also implied that Adrian pretty much bought the world and made it a communist paradise under his rule through coorporations.
*** Veidt isn't unaware of anything. He just refuses to accept it. His entire response could be read as saying "screw you, human nature. I'm going to have lasting peace even if I have to use a giant psychic squid to get it!"
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***** Pardon me, but you are? The very fact that we're having this discussion some 4,000 years after they shoveled sand over Ramses II's coffin would show you've undermined your own point.
****** Not the poster above, but how so? The point is that for all Ozymandias' clearly overwhelming arrogance in life (you don't get people to built statues of yourself calling you the "King of Kings" and imploring everyone to tremble at your mere existence unless you're ''deeply'' in love with your own awesomeness), he died, it all eventually crumbled away and he was largely forgotten about and ignored by future generations. Certainly, we're hardly looking at his works with despair or anything; more a sort of mild interest if that. You don't have to be world famous to, you know, recognize and point this out.
****** Ramses II is often called "the great." He has his [[Memetic Sex God|own brand of condoms]] and was the [[Hey, It's That Guy!|second lead]] in "The Ten Commandments." He is widely accepted as the pharaoh of the Hebrew Exodus (Which only shows most people [[Did Not Do the Research]]
******* Surely this just proves Shelley's point, though? Sure, we remember his name, but for most of us only because of a packet of rubbers and a completely inaccurate movie which isn't even about the real him. Same for the narrator of the poem, who only knows it through a vainglorious boast on a statue that's crumbling away. So much for the King of Kings, about whom we are supposed to tremble in awe and wonder and fear.
******* For that matter, based on ancient Egyptian cosmological beliefs, trembling and despairing before him is probably irrelevant. All that is truly necessary is that his name is spoken and his offering formulas are repeated/studied to bring him efficacy in the afterlife.
******* Although, unless someone actually ''is'' performing the offering formulas for a long-dead Egyptian pharaoh, there might be a bit of a problem for poor Rameses there. And it's not irrelevant to the maker (and presumably also the sponsor) of the statue, who is directly ''imploring'' people to tremble with despair at his very name. Hence, the whole point of the poem; that his arrogance has been brushed aside by the sands of history.
******** To go on a bit of a tangent, I always thought that Shelley's point isn't necessarily that Rameses II was completely forgotten, but that nothing lasts forever. He built a mighty, feared empire which, today, is completely non-existant. The testaments to his glory are crumbling away. The feared King of Kings might have been invulnerable in life, but he died as all men do, and what remains of him but memory? The sands of history washed him away, as they will do to all of
** I was under the perception that Adrian was basically doing the only thing he could. It was obvious that humanity was racing toward nuclear devastation, even to people who ''weren't'' as smart as he was. Being the world's most intelligent human being (possibly to the extent of being superhuman), Veidt might have realized that someone would eventually take over the Soviet Union who would be more willing to work with the West, and history would go down a similar path to the one that it did in the real world. He was trying to hold off apocalypse until that could happen, and if it didn't work, at least he tried something.
* Am I the only person who thinks that Ozymandias' belief that the destruction of New York would cause the U.S. and the USSR to unite to be a bit naive? I mean, was he so blind to the possibility that a nation which had invaded other countries already might simply wait until the U.S. brings all of their weight to bear in repairing New York and attack them with their pants down? They still think that Dr. Manhattan is still on Mars and were probably planning on attacking the U.S. while it was at full strength as it was. Why not when they're weakened? Call me a commie-hater if you must, but it seems to me that the USSR would have thought "Gee, there's an extra-terrestrial threat. We can either work together with our mortal enemies and probably not agree on anything, or we can conquer them easy-peasy right now and then we'll call all of the shots and defeat the alien menace in the way we think it should be done without any interferance.
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**** That's only assuming that the same man who figured out chronotons and teleportation has somehow missed that detail. I'm sure Veidt has particle physics well in hand.
* This is all ignoring one key thing: the US and the USSR are on the brink of war by the time the squid-thing arrives. Don't you think that when Nixon, or for that matter a ballistic-missile submarine captain somewhere hears that New York has just been destroyed, he'll immediately assume that this is a Soviet attack and order an all-out launch? Would every single sub captain, all of whom have independent launch authority, wait for verification that it was not a Soviet attack?
** Wait wait wait. ''Every single'' submarine captain ''independently'' has launch authority for nuclear weapons? You're saying that a submarine captain can, at any point, initiate ''nuclear war'' with no orders or authorization ''at all'' from the anyone in the higher chain of command? Do you realize how utterly ''daft'' that is?
*** Granted, I'm not in the military, but everything I've seen indicates that you '''''need''''' the authority of the President and/or the rest of the government to even ''consider'' launching nuclear weapons. Giving that kind of authority to an entirely-independent submarine captain is a ''stupid'' idea.
*** Go watch the film ''[[Crimson Tide]]'' and see exactly how stupid the idea is.
*** [[Reality Is Unrealistic|It may be stupid, but it's real]]. In the UK, that's the actual orders: fire if you discover that Britain is gone. It isn't policy per se in the US or Russia, but the actual security needed to launch a missile is basically "the captain and X other officers push the button", for any X less than three. In fact, the Soviet "Dead Hand" system (Perimetr), was basically this for land-based missiles: if sensors indicate we've been hit, you push this button and end the world.
**** Um, this really isn't accurate. Perimetr requires being armed first by the soviet leadership, and can always be overruled by Soviet Command. Otherwise, US nukes are secured with Permissive Action Links, which prevent captains and generals from just launching on their own initiative. Overall 'Britain is gone' or 'America is gone' signifies a lot more than the destruction of New York or London. It requires that the normal leadership structure be considered destroyed, with no one left to give any orders. Nixon was very much still around, still sitting in Norad.
***** The exact details of Permissive Action Link technology are classified and I certainly don't know what they are, but there is information to suggest that sub captains have access to their own PAL codes.
**** This isn't an accurate depiction of British policy either. Each sub contains a safe with a "Letter of Last Resort" - sealed orders on what to do if "Britain is gone", which change with each Prime Minister. It's unknown what they are as letters are destroyed when a PM leaves office - but the options suggested are apparently "fire nukes", "do not fire nukes", "make up your own mind" or "submit to the command of Australia or the US".
**** There's also the fact that the entire reason the submarine deterrent force exists in the first place is so that even if an enemy first strike utterly obliterates the entire country before anybody else can get a shot off, the boomers can still launch a retaliation strike. That's the sword of Damocles that makes the enemy decide that first-strike is not a viable option. The missile submarines are ''specifically designed'' to operate independently as the ultimate last-ditch contingency. Admittedly, step one of this procedure is 'Make ''really really sure'' that your government has actually ceased to exist before defaulting to independent command', but the ability to operate 100% independently if need be is the entire reason they were built.
* So, having read every post in this folder, I think I'm rather confident that for the most part the Veidt scheme would have probably worked for some limited amount of peace for some limited amount of time. But what really bugs me is this. Although the alien monster thing kills half of New York, it's never really explained exactly how it was supposed to have gotten there (obviously I mean in Veidt's official story that it's an extra-dimensional being). So what are the USSR and US going to do to arm up against ANOTHER one? What the fuck is the plan to fight a thing that just appears out of nowhere and blows up? Are they going to start sending US military forces into teleporters in the hope of finding the alien's home dimension? At the end of the book one of the voices heard on the news in Veidt's fortress even says "Could further attacks be imminent?" and the response is that they probably aren't and that the creature is some sort of alien bee that instinctively stings upon death. So yea, in summation, how the fuck are we supposed to come together in peace and harmony to fight non-intelligent creatures that appear out of nowhere at random and explode killing millions and themselves?
** How? Ask Adrian Veidt, of course.
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***** Rorshcach also implies a belief that while he fights crime, most people who are wronged have it coming. He probably thought this of Sally. Not that this troper agrees with him, but her costume and publicity were less-than-modest. He wasn't there to stop the Comedian, so all he could do is forgive him, under the impression that he was an American "hero", and agree that a marketing plan like Sally's is going to attract at least a little bit of the wrong attention.
*** It seems like Rorschach is more dedicated to stopping crime before it happens. Most of the people he kills are either in the act of committing a crime (like the man trying to rape or mug the woman in the alley), or very likely to commit a crime again (multiple rapists, people who kill children and feed them to dogs, etc.). He would probably see the crimes in The Comedian's past as being either something done years before or something horrible but necessary (like his actions in war). He didn't know about The Comedian killing the woman in Vietnam, or he probably ''would'' have killed The Comedian.
** Rorschach is deliberately painted as hypocritical and inconsistent. That's the whole problem with black-and-white
*** Indeed, his justification of his less moral actions as for the better good is actually a common theme and trait in Ditko's villains, and in the frame work of that story it is meant to show that a black and white view carried by the Question prevents slippage into gray, whilst Alan Moore's antithesis of Rorschach shows that you can slip into gray and have eroded morals even if you do have a Black and White outlook.
*** [[Your Mileage May Vary]], on the weaknesses of objective morality. This troper felt that the Comedian should've been stabbed on the spot, preferably in the lower regions, for his actions, no questions asked. The only times hypocrisy creeps in is when people allow emotions such as love or hate to color their choices.
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* Rorschach and Ozymandias are the same character. One's just prettier.
** No, they're pretty much complete opposites. The biggest difference is probably in the fact that whereas Rorshach's view of morality is based on absolutes, Ozymandias considers morality as arising from practical concerns.
** As the above poster said, they pretty much are opposites. However, they do share the belief of the true nature of humanity, [[Humans Are
*** Actually, even in that they differ. Ozymandias seems to believe that humans have both good and evil in them (or rather the appropriate equivalents in terms of moral relativism) and that humanity is capable of things both great and terrible. He then takes it upon himself to ensure it is the greatness that prevails, and not the terror.
**** Terror, like, you know, bombing New York and inducing worldwide panic.
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* Also, I know that we're supposed to regard Rorschach as a psychotic obsessed creep, but the more you read Watchmen, and the more you see of the other "heroes," the better Rorschach looks. The Comedian was a sadist and a sociopath. Night Owl was a disgusting whiner who quit when the going got rough. Ozymandias was a sociopath with delusions of godhood. And Dr. Manhattan was utterly inhuman. Rorschach was the only one of them I could feel any sympathy at all for by the end.
* I agree with you except for about Night Owl. he seemed the most normal. Rorschach was by far my favorite and the 2nd least meesed up in my opinion. but Night Owl is even less messed up than he is.
** Please don't project your own biases on everyone else. I still had quite a lot of sympathy for Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, all their personal problems aside, and even had sympathy for Ozymandias. I actually think Moore uncovered something very disturbing about comic book geeks by using Rorschach as, well, a Rorschach blot. The fact that you can dismiss Nite
*** ''"...natural, human revulsion toward violence and conflict..." "...says something disturbing about..."'' Please don't project your own biases on everyone else. This troper, for one, has long found human failings and weaknesses to be some of the most pathetic things in existence, and the heroes [[Shinji and Warhammer40K|who refuse to bend to them]] to be, in turn, the definition of admirable, if not awesome.
*** This Troper would like to make the observation that most people who idolize those characters who "refuse to bend to their emotions" tend to be, for lack of a less blunt term, losers with little to no social interactions to speak of. Through forming bonds, you realize the importance of emotion, like Nite Owl did. Rorschach's fans are something like people who hate romances because they've never experienced love. They identify with his lack of emotion because they wish to harden themselves against the tough truths of the world: Emotion is all we really have. You experience all the emotions you can, then you die. That's life. Heroes who strive for normalcy are the most real in this Troper's eyes.
*** Characters without failings and weaknesses just aren't realistic, and are frankly boring. Watchmen isn't supposed to be an escapist adventure story, but an exploration of some messed up people. Everyone has flaws and weaknesses, and makes mistakes, and fails. You linked to a fan-fic featuring a Marty Stu (inspired by a tabletop game...) to demonstrate your idea of heroism and you classify a revulsion toward violence and conflict as a weakness. Holy shit. Face it, Rorschach is all about human frailty. He is, ultimately, a failure. That's why he's sympathetic - out of all the characters, he's the one on the verge of total collapse. His ideals just don't match up with reality.
*** I had sympathy for Nite-Owl as an intelligent, but despairing individual, and pity for Silk Spectre and Rorschach as victims of their upbringing. I could admire Ozymandias: He had faced the futility and desperate brutality of human life, like the Comedian and Rorschach, but he, at least, was willing to change the world for the better through unpleasant means, rather than just striking out at what angered him. I agree that this work is a Rorschach of the reader, and yes, my own sympathies disturb me in this case.
***
**** However, the world of Watchmen isn't the real world. It has different leaders, events, and technologies. And most importantly, as pointed out by one bits in the TPB, it has a world with two superpower nations, but where one has been forced to endure humiliating defeat after humiliating defeat and setback after setback, and is looking to recover that lost national pride and dignity with a vengeance. Furthermore, I think one of the main themes was about authoritarianism and the addiction to power. The US of Watchmen has dictated terms to the rest of the world for so long, been so absolute in it's command of geopolitics, that it no longer knows any other way to respond to a Soviet provocation. There's no attempt at discussion, negotiation, or the like, it's instantly an ultimatum: "Stop or else!" The longer an authoritarian system/person is in place, the more rigid and inflexible they become, unable to do anything but make such commands.
**** Also note that this was written in 1985, [[The Great Politics Mess-Up|before the collapse of the Soviet Union]].
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*** I have to disagree. The Comedian's sociopathic personality (which I think the rape scene shows was always there to some extent, just brought more to the light by war and the passage of time) goes beyond anything you can chalk up to "depression." Or even "I have some issues to work out." He's callous, sadistic, morally bankrupt and self-centered. I think he does have some real, genuine sadness about his daughter, sure. That's a part of him, but not all of him---suggesting that his behavior can be traced to separation from her oversimplifies the character.
*** Like a real comedian, The Comedian is a master of analyzing others. He predicted very accurately the outcomes and feelings of other characters, including the silk spectre's feelings for him while being forced to pretend to be in a relationship with the closet homosexual Hooded justice, He raped her because deep down she WANTED him to, which she had only realized in her old age. I like to think of him as the opposite of Dr. Manhattan : he has no empathy towards others because he understands people so WELL. He knew how everything was going to play out and was frustrated with the slowness of everyone else. So naturally he relieved his frustrations by throwing napalm on everything.
*** Um, no. He was callously beating the shit out of people for the jollies of it long before he had a
*** The most fucked up thing to me, is that if The Comedian wasn't a rapist, and a murderer who killed his own child (which may explain why he feels so bad about not being able to know his own daughter, by the way) I'd say he was the character I most Identify with, the one I like the most, and the one that if I met, I'd be most likely to become friends with. He sees past all the bullshit and stabs right at the issue, he brings up the elephant in the room, says what everyone's thinking but are afraid to mention. You take away his sociopathy and he's so likable. That's disturbing beyond words. He's almost like an evil version of [[Seinfeld|Kramer]]
*** I despised the Comedian the more I read, but... I really felt bad for him when he broke down in front of Moloch.
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* What the hell is up with Alan Moore? Really, this is a general question- the man writes truly bizarre scenarios that are even more bizarre and questionable when you consider the underlying philosophy. The incident where the all-powerful Dr. Manhattan has his faith in life and humanity restored by the knowledge that his girlfriend is the daughter of a man who previously attempted to rape her mother is especially offensive.
** Now, while this editor can't read Alan Moore's mind and tell you what the hell's up with him, the scene cited does not go as you apparently think it does. What changes Dr. Manhattan's mind isn't that knowledge (and, for all it's worth, it was only ''attempted'' rape, broken up by Hooded Justice; the encounter that led to Laurie's conception happened later.), but the sudden realization that all of life is so random as to be completely unpredictable, which smashes through his then-ironclad fatalism. This is emphasized when the scene pulls back to reveal he and Laura are standing in a giant crater on Mars that ''just happens'' to be a smiley face. N.B., during the "Face on Mars" controversy, genuine NASA scientists had produced pictures of a crater that ''really'' did look like a smiley face.
*** Roger Ebert [https://web.archive.org/web/20130207211327/http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/03/were_all_puppets_laurie_im_jus.html understood this], and he only saw the film!
** How to put this delicately? There have been rumors for 25 years, if not longer, that Mr. Moore has a taste for certain substances that most governments proscribe. And given all the psychedelic themes in so much of his work, like the infamous "LSD love potato" from one particularly surreal arc of "Saga of the Swamp Thing" he wrote in the 80s, he isn't trying very hard to dispel the rumors. If anything, the rumors stem from people noticing that he keeps gravitating to these ideas. This is, of course, only rumor, and I am just some random guy on the Interweb who claims no knowledge of his personal habits.
**** He's stated in interviews that he uses psychedelic drugs as part of his "religious" ritual.
**** He wouldn't be the only comic writer to get off his gourd now and again, and the fact that he smokes terrifyingly huge quantities of dope has never been denied. Anyway, what does this have to do with anything?
***** Ah, [https://web.archive.org/web/20130926020602/http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp02132008.shtml Alan Moore]. To be slightly more serious, for a long time it has seemed to me that, for whatever reason, possibly related to the above, possibly not, he does not look at the world quite the same way the rest of us do. It comes through in his storytelling. Sometimes what he creates is delightfully different. I personally enjoyed "Tom Strong" and the first "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" graphic novel a great deal, for example. Sometimes his visions fall flat, like "Lost Girls," which probably would never have seen print had it not had his name attached to it.
***** I think it is well summed up by this brief description of Moore from [[wikipedia:Alan Moore|that other wiki]]: "He is a vegetarian, an anarchist,(17) a practicing magician and occultist, and he worships a Roman snake-deity named Glycon.(18)." Moore is an unusual man.
****** Glycon was also a puppet, and had a woman's face. Its name translates as "sweetie". It was a fictional deity made up by the satirist Lucien, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster of ancient Rome.
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** Ok, but even so, how does the knowledge that a twisted nihilist tried to rape a woman at all break his [[The Fatalist|fatalism]]? It's still a really weird, borderline-offensive source of 'epiphany.'
*** Because that's not what got him back. Laurie wasn't born from the (failed) rape; she was born from when her mother voluntarily started an affair with the Comedian later (and regretted it). This is made pretty clear by the scene with Sally kissing the photograph at the end. Manhattan is fascinated by Sally starting an affair with someone who she has "every reason to hate," and realizes that he doesn't understand everything. Of course, this can seem a little twisted too...but the point isn't that Manhattan learns that life is meaningful, it's that he learns that life is unpredictable and therefore "miraculous" in a way that particles and planets are not.
**** Exactly. And looking at it from Manhattan's point of view, it seems unlikely that he would be able to fully appreciate the horror of that attempted rape anyway. You shouldn't go into Watchmen expecting any kind of easy, cut-and-dried moral [[Aesop
*** I always thought that he had his epiphany because before he never really appreciated the randomness of human existence. He says that out of the millions of sperm that could have impregnated the egg, only the one that would become Laurie did. And the fact that her mother had every right to hate the Comedian, but decided to have sex with him anyway. And the fact that these two people being born was just as random as Laurie's birth, and so on for the entire human race. After all, had that single sperm not impregnated the egg, someone else besides Laurie would have been born, and he would not be having this conversation right now. He compared the existence of every person to the idea that oxygen can spontaneously turn into gold: highly improbable, but with a small chance.
**** And so, often, is history. As much as it's subverted by the Black Freighter thread, what Veidt's attempt shows, as well as Manhattan's realisation, is that the world as we know it stands on a deep, twisted and irredeemably complex historical formation, one where the exact causal relationship between the present and the past can be almost impossible to trace. That's also one of the reasons for the book's structure - it constantly weaves storylines together, interposing panels yet drawing brief connections between them by symbolic allusion (eg the perpetually reoccuring bloodstain). Manhattan knows: he can see the crystal castle that's already visible in the deep sand from which it will rise.
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* Additional discussion:
** Dr. Manhattan explicitly states that he can see ''only his own future.'' Meaning that it's entirely possible that it could be deterministic in a quantum pseudobabble sense: because he is observing his future at all times, it is forced to resolve itself into a single state, rather than a Schrodinger's Cat-like flux of states. It is deterministic because he believes it is. What with his other pseudointellectual nihilistic bullshit, it's entirely possible that Dr. Manhattan is simply too self-involved to really ''understand'' the big picture at anything above the subatomic level.
*** ...Well, that's not how quantum physics actually works (at the macro level, everything really is
**** So we can therefore determine that Dr. Manhatten is... [[Grand Unifying Guesses|Muad'dib]].
**** Wouldn't he change the future by observing it? Isn't that what Heisenberg says? So he really doesn't know anything.
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** I've always thought he was just lying. He knows very well that there are differences between a living body and a dead one; he just doesn't care for unrelated reasons, but finds it easier to pretend to science his way out of it, knowing nobody in the room has the ability to call him on it.
** Dr. Manhattan quite simply fails thermodynamics forever, and all processes related to thermodynamics (i.e. anything macroscopic and non-simplifiable, such as a human body). The "thermodynamic miracle" of two cells coming together to form this particular Silk Specter, for example - chance doesn't work that way. Next time you see a car, look at it's license plate. Wow, did you see that? PX-13-AA? What's the chance of getting that one? One in a million! That's a thermodynamic miracle! (No, it isn't, because you could be this surprised at any license plate, however unlikely this particular one happened to be). In thermodynamic terms, human interactions and even their identities are microstates of the macrostate of "life". Any particular ordering of microstates is rare, but there are many that have the same result (impending nuclear annihilation). The fact that the Silver Specter exists is as miraculous as finding some chewing gum on a particular tile of the pavement (the tile still being unspecified until the moment of finding), from a thermodynamic perspective. She's just another microstate. What is a miracle is that he managed to engage in quantum physics (not to mention get a Ph.D.) with such a terrible understanding of statistical physics. So, anyway, given his less-than-high school knowledge concerning statistical physics, it's no wonder he fails to see the entropic decay, change of fluid dynamics, destruction of constant maintanence of chemical homeostasis, and just plain drop in brain polarization, associated with a severe case of death.
*** First off, it's Silk Spectre.<ref>
**** (Manhattan fails thermodynamics guy here). No, the license plate could have been any number. If the person driving it had went somewhere else, or had left their keys at home, or if the traffic lights were just off by a few seconds, or if the owner had bought a car a day later, etc. etc. The point is that it's not statistically valid to be surprised at an outcome you didn't predict. Also, if he doesn't even understand human life, how did he get into this deterministic rut in the first place? If every single human you see is unpredictable, how could he ever get saddened by the predictability of life? As to the astronomicality of odds - the chance of all the numbers of the US national lotto coming up in the order they did is smaller than of Napoleon Bonaparte suddenly appearing out of thin air and cutting your head of right now. Yet you will be surprised to find yourself suddenly decapitated, but not surprised at the lotto numbers being in the current order. It's because I predicted your head being cut off, but nobody predicted the Lotto numbers (with 100% accuracy). No matter how unlikely the event, it is not scientifically valid to be surprised by it. There are billions of chance events taking place every second, so it is merely statistically necessary that some of these events will yield astronomically unlikely odds. And why would Manhattan look "from the most basic level possible". That is, [[Xkcd|as scientists are calling it, "pretty darn stupid"]]. It is at least as easy to recognize the difference between a dead and living human as between a human and a plant, if looking at small scales (is there ATP? Y/N).
***** It comes down to this. No matter how smart Doctor Manhattan is, he can't demonstrate more knowledge than his own writer, and Alan Moore isn't a physicist, a biologist or a mathematician. He's a mystic with some very odd ideas about the universe, and Manhattan is voicing some of them. You're technically right to say that the character should know better, but there's a clear answer to all this - ''Alan Moore'' likely doesn't know or care about the details, he's just making his own philosophical point. Superhumanly smart characters are still limited by their humanly-smart writers. Within his own universe, Manhattan's correct simply because that's how the story's been written. We can use our real-world knowledge to say that he's babbling nonsense, but that doesn't really change anything within the story. It just tells us that the writer isn't a scientist. (With that said, I do sympathize with your being annoyed by the logic he's using: it's a lot like rolling a 6-sided die and then saying that whatever random number comes up only had a 1 in 6 chance of being rolled, so it's a miracle.)
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** IIRC, Moore stated in interviews - during the original run of Watchmen - that the legality of masked vigilantes lead to a breakdown and things got out of control. By the '70's, the police and the courts were faced with numerous cases of a guy putting on a mask, beating on somebody he didn't like, and then when arrested saying "It wasn't assault and battery, I'm a superhero!!" But still, this troper was a bit annoyed at how while this and the existence of other superheroes (other than the main characters we saw) was lightly implied it was never shown in the comic and thus, it seems that cops across America are on strike because three people in costumes are beating up guys who like being beaten (c.f. Captain Carnage).
* In New York City, a densely populated area with about 8 million people, there were only shown about a dozen superheroes and it wasn't implied that there were any more. Seriously, would that small amount of people cause such a big deal? With that distribution, there would only be a couple hundred vigilantes in the entire country, if not less. Even if these people are more "super" than regular vigilantes (which kind of undermines the realism aspect of Watchmen), there would be no way they could make a significant dent in any sort of criminal activity.
** The realism aspect of Watchmen is already a bit hazy. Ozymandias is in his late forties but he's portrayed as a semi-Superman, catching bullets and the like. Dan and Laurie have been in retirement and out of practice for ten years, Laurie in her mid-thirties, Dan in his forties or so, but when threatened in an alleyway they take down or disable ''five armed thugs half their age'' without a mark on either of them. During the
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** It's like with the Joker, only less evil incarnate, and more misogynistic anti-social sociopath with one friend to his name. Other than that, I dunno. There's just something inherently badass about who he is, how he grew up and how he came to be. It's like watching a wild animal that hates his own kind. You just want to watch from the other side of the safety glass and see what he does.
** Surprisingly, the answer here comes from a Mel Gibson movie (no, ''Braveheart'', not ''[[The Passion of the Christ]]'') from Robert the Bruce's father: "You admire this man, this Wallace. Uncompromising men are easy to admire. He has courage; so does a dog. But it is ''exactly'' the ability to compromise that makes a man noble."
*** Considering what the elder Bruce did with his "nobility", that comparison reflects better on Rorschach than Veidt.
** I just want to give him a hug.
*** I would totally give him a hug, even though he'd probably be horrified and kill me.
*** I third the "hug" motion. Furthermore, if [
** Rorschach's appeal is the appeal that every "simple solution" holds. His approach to saving the world is a variation on the Ghaleon Principle: find the right guy (he doesn't have to be a [[Bishounen|long-haired bishounen]]) and beat the everloving ''shit'' out of him. His black-and-white morality is seductive in its simplicity: aku soku
** A lot of the heroes we love just tend to be fanatically-driven psychotic travesties of human beings. Check out the protagonist of [[V for Vendetta]] for an example, although V is much more of a gallant rogue than Rorschach. Probably doesn't smell as offensive either. We love Rorschach for the same reasons people love Batman and his obsessive quest to scour Gotham; ''Watchmen'' just demonstrated the logical progression of the Batman kind of mindset.
** He's an extreme disciple of Kantian morality (though he probably doesn't think about it like that): essentially, things are right because they spring from the right motives ("The Good Will", as Kant termed it). By contrast, Ozymandias is an extreme disciple of Utilitarianism: better to kill millions if it saves ''billions''. Of course, either or both could be mistaken in their moral viewpoint.
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** Perhaps it's because Rorschach is an outcast. We've all felt like outcasts at one time or another, and can therefore relate to him better than the characters who, while they do have their flaws, are generally accepted.
** For the very same reason that we like [[Badass]] characters, as even stated on that page. He both does what he wants, despite any blockages - Keene act, etc. - and what he believes in - without compromise. And he pulls off insane, over the top stunts in pursuit of what he believes - justice for the wicked, in a manner of speaking.
** This troper thinks it's mainly because Rorschach is a walking [[Think of the Children]] trope. Like it or not, half his backstory and significant sympathetic characterisation revolve around the subject of hurt children: his upbringing; the Roche kidnapping; the final confrontation with his landlady. Nobody else has an explicitly horrible upbringing: Ozy and Dan came from privileged backgrounds, Laurie was kept more or less ignorant of her parentage (her stepfather is a bully, but it's almost an afterthought, unlike the [[Anvilicious|dropping of the anvil]] with Kovacs'), Osterman had a trade but otherwise wasn't underprivileged, the Comedian doesn't have a past, and even Hollis Mason is presented in the [[All There in the Manual|filler text]] as having a loving family. Kovacs, by comparison, is the illegitimate son of a prostitute. He doesn't even know who his father is, his ''own mother'' beats the hell out of him when he's less than ten years old ''and says she should have aborted him''. His early life is implied as one long [[Break the Cutie]] moment, and, despite metaphorically wading through blood, he has great empathy for a little child in a position like his own. That character feature (rightly or wrongly) redeems him, at an emotional level, despite all of his sociopathic behaviour, into [[Magnificent Bastard]] territory; indeed, the presentation of his abusive mother is very heavily implied as direct justification for his misogyny. When he's in prison, he's presented figuratively as a child among adults: physically smaller than the people who threaten
* In addition, Rorschach has a badass mask.
* Because ultimately he's the only character to refuse to accept Veidt's (and Moore's) concept of "benevolent" fascism, that people are stupid and gullible and need the smarter and more powerful to manipulate them into doing things for their own good. Rorschach may hold humanity in contempt, but he still believes in humanity's right to make its own decisions. He advocates for liberty and truth in the face of fascism and lies. He's the only character that is willing to own up to who and what he is, as much of a horrible mess as that is, whereas all the others pat themselves on the back for being good and moral and true but constantly yield to subjective morality. He's pretty much a lousy human being, but he's also pretty much the only one worthy of being called one.
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**** That's called "subjective morality" and it's exactly the thing people use to justify stuff like, oh, eugenics.
** Probably just a [[Misaimed Fandom]]. I think the book makes it obvious that Rorschach's cut-and-dry morality... well, everything you said. He's not supposed to be sympathetic.
** [[Main/Gattsuru|This Troper]] will admit it's a matter of Misaimed
*** But he ''did'' turn into a monster. He stuffs an at-this-point-harmless old man into the fridge for literally no reason. He breaks several barflies' fingers for talking to him funny. Everyone is terrified of him because he's totally off his rocker. He is seriously the most evil (living) person in the whole entire comic.
**** '''That''' is your definition of "the most evil person"? Breaking the fingers of the guys in a [[Bad Guy Bar]] and putting a guy, formerly a supervillain, in a fridge for a grand total of, maybe, 30 seconds? '''That''' is "evil"? I'll agree that he's a monster in the [[Those Who Fight Monsters]] sense, but saying those two things are proof of his "evil" is just ludicrous. If you want to call him "evil", cite the really ''nasty'' shit he does, at least, like burning a dude alive. But even that is [[Pay Evil Unto Evil]] at worst
No, Rorschach is pretty firmly in the "good" alignment, if you consider that he targets known criminals, typically while they're in the process of, or have just finished, doing something horrible to someone. His methods are monstrous, certainly, but that doesn't make him "evil" unless you're going by a very, ''very'' broad definition of "evil".
If you're going to call Rorschach "evil" for breaking some fingers for information, then you have to call Dan and Laurie "evil" for their utter brutalizing of the knottops that attack them, especially since it's implied Laurie took them through the neighborhood specifically so they'd attract that kind of attention.
**** More evil than Veidt? You do realize Veidt and Osama bin Laden have approximately the same motivations right?
**** He breaks
**** The murder of a rapist and murderer, who turns out to want to save the world through destroying large portions of it. Rorschach ''is'' pretty dark gray, but so is the rest of the world; he's not, however, ''more'' evil than, say, Ozymandias, if we're judging by motivation alone.
*** No. The most evil would be Big Figure, or some of the knothead street gangers who killed Hollis Mason, not Rorschach.
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**** I don't think anyone will argue that Moore thought Rorschach was a good guy. There are too many interviews to the contrary. But it takes more than burning a child murderer to make a [[Complete Monster]] out of the man.
**** There's a difference between 'monster' and '[[Complete Monster]]', of course. Largely, Rorschach ''does'' do what he believes is "good," but that doesn't mean his methods of doing things necessarily mesh with those of others. He's a psychopath, if a well-meaning one.
*** To interpret the words of some of the people above, Rorschach may be [[I Am Not Shazam|Adam]], but he's not [[Frankenstein]]. He's violent because he's screwed up, has a few stock [[Freudian Excuse
** Wait, killing two dogs is what qualifies as [[Moral Event Horizon]] for you? Wow, hope you never have to work at a pound.
*** Rorschach doesn't seem to be a good guy or a bad guy, he seems to only care about his brothers in arms he doesn't give a crap about the common man or any one over the age of innocence.
{{quote|Rorschach: The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!"... and I'll look down and whisper "No." They had a choice, all of them.}}
***** "The age of innocence" is an arrow pointing at that flaw in Rorschach's way of thinking. What ''is'' the cut-off age for 'not deserving of murder'? 10? 12? 16? To Rorschach, 99.9% of the world is whores and politicians, and that just isn't true, even in Watchman's [[Crapsack World]]. The fact that Rorschach ''doesn't'' care about 'the common man' is what makes him a monster (though not a Complete one), even though he's not necessarily evil.
** Moore showing us the ugliness of this train of
** Killing the dogs was done to torture the child-murdering sicko he'd tracked down. Also, considering that Rorschach had a psychotic break due to the sheer horror of that man's evil, I'd cut Rorschach a little slack.
** This troper feels that Rorschach's admiration of the Commedian is a strong strike against his hero-status. He brushes the Commedian's attempted rape of Silk Spectre off as a 'moral lapse of a man who has died for his country', which kinda undercuts his position as an uncompromising force of justice. Apparantly, another masked guy who fights dirty gets a free pass in his book.
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== One More Body Amongst The Foundations / (Spoilers) Was It Worth It?! ==
* You know what bugs me? The ending. Rorschach's death bugged me, if only because the character could be used for some interesting moral/psychological exporation. The implication that ''half of New York'' died for naught bugs me.
** The most interesting thing about Rorschach is the way he chooses death, in my
** I think it is supposed to. Watchmen doesn't have a conclusion AT ALL, if I'm right, so it is left for the reader to come up with one. Besides, half of New York didn't die for nothing, they died for world peace. Or did they?
*** The 'or did they' is the part that bugs me. Granted, I doubt it would have worked as well if it had ended differently.
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**** I belive that was a solution, but only temporary. Everybody would be at each other throats in less than 100 years.
***** 100 years of world peace is worth half a city. Lot more would have died in the prevented wars, and money that would have gone to the millitary/industrial complex could be applied to medicine, food and economic buildup.
****** If someone killed your family and said "I'm a genius who understands these things, it had to be done for the greater good", would you kiss them for it? Because if not you're a hypocrite.
*** Don't assume that "peace between the U.S. and Russia" is ''world'' peace. There are plenty of countries and cultures where a mere alien invasion and the death of all New York would be an annoying distraction compared to the ongoing battles against the traditional age-old enemies of their people. There certainly would not be a cessation of wars for a single generation, let alone 100 years.
**** Peace between the USA and USSR leads to world
***** Yep, a single hegemonic superpower would have the ability to crush any pissant Third World troublemakers like Iraq or Afghanistan real easy. What a wonderful world they were able to make. Empire is never pretty, and it isn't nice. A divided world isn't pretty and it isn't nice. World Peace is a dream because human beings live in the world.
****** It's interesting how no one considers the possibility of the creation of an al-Qaeda-like organization that operates outside of international boundaries. Almost ten years into their notion of a "war on terrorism", and al-Qaeda continues to operate unchallenged and gather new members in plenty of the world. The fictional Brotherhood of Nod would be an even larger example as well, in that it's not tied to one specific religion. If a superstate were to form, its true greatest threat would be an enemy without a single location that operates in many respects as a virus does.
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** As far as Dan and Laurie go, it seems they just broke down. Giddy after some successes they had donned their costumes once more and faced off against the man they thought was the villain. And he kicked their butts, blew their minds, and then let them stay at his place because he didn't consider them a threat.
*** [[Sus|I]]'m inclined to beliece this. Learning that, after all the heroics you just pulled off, all you managed to do was ''fail'' at preventing the [[Well-Intentioned Extremist]] from saving the world is [[Heroic BSOD]] material if there ever was any. As for Doc Manhattan, from his detached viewpoint Ozy's [[Utopia Justifies the Means]] is probably justified or at least the lesser evil compared to [[The End of the World as We Know It|two superpowers hugging each other with nuclear arms]].
* The other issue with killing Veidt is
----
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**** Why on earth would you assume he didn't consider other plans?
**** Or that Veidt is even eligible to run for President? His parents immigrated to America the year he was born. It's not specified if he was born before or after they'd arrived.
** It's also worth bearing in mind that Ozymandias is quite possibly ''fucking insane''. Just like every other character, Ozy has been affected and twisted by his career as a vigilante. Rorshach became more brutal and paranoid as he went down his path; Manhattan became more detached and inhumane as he goes down his; et cetera. I don't think Ozymandias' plan is supposed to come across as sane and sensible; he's the [[Knight Templar|idealistic monster]], a psychopath with a God complex. You could see him as actually representing Rorschach's ethos, on a massive scale: Rorschach tortures and kills "scum" because he sees it as necessary to carry out justice; Ozy is willing to commit a crime against humanity because he sees it as necessary to save the Earth from itself. And as a result, I think both characters are supposed to come across as compelling and repellent at the same time. Neither is simply a "good guy" or "bad guy." And ultimately, Moore's depiction of their
*** Veidt ''is'' insane. This plan isn't necessarily what Adrien Veidt would do. It's what Ozymandias would do. It's big, elaborate, and crafty. Veidt has little to no regard for the world's fate. He's doing this to satisfy the thirst for feeling like a hero. Why else do you think he executes his plan while wearing his costume?
*** Perhaps he feels it depersonalises him? That Ozymandias, who is not entirely human, may take on morale burdens that the merely-human Veidt may not? After all, the archetype of the superhero is about more than a clever disguise, it's about creating a animate personification of "right"; for the superhero to be something more than human, it is necessary for them to become something ''other'' than human. Veidt may feel that he needs to undertake his plan while in his Ozymandias persona to provide the distance from humanity needed to engage in such a tremendous act of, if we are frank, vigilantism, to allow himself to become something capable of playing god.
**** Doesn't fit with the end of the story and the fact Ozymandias recognises himself as the mariner in "Marooned". He outright says to Manhattan that "I've made myself ''feel'' every death." Empathy's not in the vocabulary of a psychopath.
** Also, to paraphrase Scott
*** That is quite possibly the silliest thing Scott Adams ever said. And the competition is stiff. Smart,
**** Maybe. But try telling that to the guy who goes around calling himself and certainly considers himself the smartest man on Earth.
**** Also don't forget that this is a book, and a superhero comic book at that. The genre is full of "super geniuses" who, aside from having their names on a number of diplomas and devices the author thought up, are dumb as a sack of bricks or at least no more intelligent than their almost certainly not super genius creators. I'd say Ozy fits neatly into this category.
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** It wasn't just the immediate threat of warfare. It was also the strain the Cold War put on the economy of both sides, the growing feelings of hostility, the food crisis, and other such issues. He wanted to end all of them at once.
** Because World War 3 was coming sooner rather than later. Veidt thought that the war was not only inevitable, it was imminent. When he forced Manhattan away from Earth, he wasn't doing so in order to raise tensions from behind the Iron Curtain, he was doing it so that Manhattan couldn't stop him. It didn't matter if tensions rose during the brief period between Manhattan's disappearance and the appearance of the tentacle monster/worldwide catastrophe, because immediately thereafter, things would be fixed.
* As to why Veidt didn't simply run for President: because it wouldn't have given him the power to stop the war in any event. The office of the President isn't a dictator with absolute power; he still answers to Congress and to the people every four years. He's the only one who can launch the nukes, yes, but that doesn't
** As [[Lex Luthor]] says in [[Justice League Unlimited]] "Do you know how much power I'd have to GIVE UP just to become President?"
* There is one thing that bugs me about successness of Veidt plan: Dr.Manhattan can see the future, Veidt finds a way to stop him from doing it. Couldn't he instead to '''ask''' him whether or not the nuclear war was inevitable?
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** Even if he did, they could just make more bombs. Besides, by that point they've been in the [[Cold War]] for decades. If something wasn't useful for defense or propaganda there wasn't much point in supporting it, and if Manhattan refused he'd have been branded as a traitor and probably vivisected... somehow.
** He's Omnipotent he could have disappeared all of Russia, maybe he just didn't want to.
** To keep people from fighting completely, he'd have to do more than make a handful of bombs disappear, he'd have to police people's behavior. That's something he'd be capable of doing, but willing? I think the scene with the Comedian in Vietnam show how detached and fatalistic he is. He just does what the government tells him to. Frankly, the real question
*** Because he probably told them that it wouldn't work, because [[You Already Changed the Past|he could see along the timeline and could tell he hadn't done it, therefore it was never going to happen.]] Also, the US probably couldn't predict the consequences if he chose to do so: anything from uniting the planet against the US, to messing with the world's electromagnetic field, to the damage in public relations: at this point in history the Holocaust was still heavily on people's minds, and having one man unilaterally erase an entire ''people'' from existence would bear [[Unfortunate Implications]] to say the least.
** He wasn't omnipotent. If that wasn't clear enough just from what he does (or, more accurately, what he doesn't do), he specifically says he could only intercept about 50% of missiles launched by Russia. Why do so many people think he's omnipotent?
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** I was talking about his crappy [[Silver Age]] revival peices, like Supreme, and Tom Strong. Those seem to me like an "Oh shit, what have I done! I'd better try to bring comics back to the way they where before Watchmen!" attitude.
*** You presume they are, in fact, crappy. A hell of a lot of people *like* his Supreme and Tom Strong. ( also, Tom Strong isn't retro Silver Age, its retro Pulp )
*** Er, that's because most of the comics based on Watchmen suck quite hard. The whole "Watchmen taught us that comic book superheroes have to be dark and grim and depressing!" is one of the most colossal examples of missing the point I've ever seen, and the eventual backlash against it almost destroyed superhero comics as a medium (if nothing else, because some [[Moral Guardians]] were quite justified in saying that "Modern Age" comics were increasingly about justifying and glorifying mindless slaughter because it was awesome). Hardly anyone who was involved in the shitty faddism of "post-Watchmen" comics will talk about it now without apologizing for
*** Also, Rorschach is awesome. The half-dozen hundred clones of Rorschach that came afterwards, not so awesome. Especially when you subtract the tragedy and moral ambiguity and replace it with an endless droning chorus of "FUCK YEAH I'M AWESOME I ROCK". ([[The Authority]], I'm looking at you.)
** There's also the fact that it's success resulted in DC Comics screwing him over, which in turn pretty much caused a complete fallout between the two, which would result in some understandable bad feeling. Ultimately, though, Moore's never expressed any dislike for the work
** Unless you like that kind of thing. I myself am a huge fan of the so called [[Dark Age]].
** I honestly don't think Moore has apolgised for anything he has ever done, ever. It's just not in his nature.
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*** You're a monster.
** You are missing the point if you thought that was anything but exactly what was intended. Human morality is complex and difficult, otherwise people wouldn't talk so dismissively about reducing the world to terms of 'black and white'. As for Ozy being a monster, it's probably true, but I would point out that Rorschach's brutal quest to deliver justice was meaningless by his own admission, changing nothing, whereas Ozy's crime meant peace - at least for a while. Is it worth shattering that? Wouldn't that make Dan and Co. more monstrous? It wouldn't bring back those who died, and it might very well cause billions more deaths. It would be hard to protest the value of truth and integrity while being vaporized in nuclear fire.
*** It seems to me the ''whole point'' of the morality in Watchmen is expressed by the very concept of Rorschach, as he expresses it to the shrink: the world ordinarily ''doesn't'' have meaning or morality. It's just a random set of events, as meaningless as a Rorschach inkblot; one only makes order by ''imposing'' some meaning on the inkblots. That's why Kovacs becomes Rorschach: he is simply functioning within the world as he understands it to operate. You get an interesting echo from Dr. Manhattan on Mars when Laurie realises whose child she
*** Peace achieved by permitting a mass murder and letting the killer go free is an empty peace. It's like saying leaving Nazi Germany alone, or doing nothing to Hitler once WWII was over is the right thing. And no, they'd be more heroic bringing Ozy to justice and letting the system do what it wants to him. In addition, consider this- If you had a patient in a hospital, going to die no matter what, and you could keep them alive a bit longer, but they'd be in intense pain, would it be better to let them die, or keep them in pain even longer? Keep them in pain, or let them die in peace?
*** ''Nothing'' is like the Nazis. The key assumption here is whether or not Ozy averted the ''end of the world'' in doing what he did; if he ''did'', then would that not, objectively, logically, be worth that tiny fraction of the billions of human lives on the planet? If he ''didn't'' (and that seems to be what you've decided), then yes, he's a monster and a mass-murderer, and so is everyone who willingly went along with it. Dan and the others decided that yes, Ozy saved the world, which seems to be supported by Ozy's TV screens. Whether or not they were right is supposed to be a standing question at the end of the novel, with the subtext that these decisions cannot be made by normal humans; but then, who can make them? Who decides right and wrong? Who watches the watchmen? (For the record, I'd ask the patient.)
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*** That's... um, [[Knight Templar|kind of insane]]. What the hell would be the point of gaining justice for one man at the cost of everything else? Who would it benefit? But that aside - Ozy's implied to have made his own punishment. He's going to be wracked by doubt and guilt for the rest of his life, and one day he'll realise that when he dies, the peace may collapse without him to maintain it. For a man as arrogant as him, that would be a truly terrible realisation - that his genius amounted to nothing.
*** Also, "Fiat iustitia et pereat mundus" translates more literally as, "Let justice be done, ''and'' destroy the world", making it something of a foregone conclusion, rather than a possible outcome.
**** In [[Real Life]], the post-Stalin leaders of USSR were nowhere near as monstrous as some Watchmen-readers seem to assume. They are hardly the "unseen, Sauron-like threat" - Ozy is. And to a lesser degree, the superheroes themselves - who allowed themselves to be used by corrupt politicians to push the world to the brink of Armageddon. How are Ozy's motivations any better than Nixon's? Of course, the Soviet leaders had Stalin's blood on their hands (though they rejected and condemned Stalin after his death), but they certainly weren't in the same league (and if Ozy had been a bearded Middle-Easterner, would all those enlightened utilitarians still defend his actions?) This thought process is not "Fiat iustitia et pereat mundus"
***** The leaders of the USSR were in fact [[Complete Monster]]s (just like the leaders of modern Russia) and the only reason they didn't have as big of a body count as Veidt was that the rest of the world wouldn't have let them get away with it. They tried (and are trying) pretty hard anyway.
*** It'd benefit the heroes, in my view. Picture this- Nite-Owl and Rorschach have brought in Ozymandias, and are exposing his action on a global address. "All this time, you've been scared of those of us who wear masks, while the real evil was right there all the time, peddling himself to the masses." Can you say Keene Act repeal, justice is served, and an overall show that even in a cynical world, there's still a place for ideals? And hey, we managed to outlast the Russians here- Who says we can't in that Earth? [[You Fail Logic Forever|False dilemma, anyone?]]
**** Uh, sure, and what would that accomplish? Why is repealing the Keene Act some kind of objectively good thing, given that many superheroes * were* objectively psychotic violent bastards who abused their anonymity and their power * all the time* ? Part of the point of Watchmen is that it starts you out thinking the story will be about the Keene Act and ends up showing you how ridiculously narcissistic such a point of view
**** Also, we outlasted Russia in our universe because we didn't become totally dependent on Dr. Manhattan for our national defense, and because we didn't shove the Soviet leaders into a corner and force them to go out in a blaze of glory rather than simply be crushed by the American juggernaut. In real life the USSR had the chance to crumble under its own weight, because it had the chance to run its own little empire and
**** You can't claim someone is objectively a bastard while asserting that there is no fixed moral absolutes. Also, Watchmen is a commentary on the ''American'' empire, and the hypocrisy of American obsession with "Soviet expansionism" when we own and claim military hegemony over half the world. Nixon was an [[Expy]] for Reagan, don't forget.
***** Yes, we're all aware that Alan Moore is a political moron, thank you.
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*** In ''your'' opinion. In my opinion, and that of everyone I've ever heard talk seriously about the book, every page is leading up to that end - a subversion of the shiny-heroes-beat-the-black-caped-villain-and-stop-his-plan end - in ways too numerous to list. Honestly, dude. If you want a story that celebrates heroes where everything is clear-cut with a happy ending, you really should look elsewhere. Watchmen is not that book and it never was intended to be, except possibly way ''way'' back when it was still the original Charlton characters.
*** Oh - and there are moments like that. They're not very frequent, but they're often enough for there to be too many to type up.
**** Some folks seem to be defending "Darker and Drearier" for it's own sake, as if Deconstructionism automatically equals [[Diabolus Ex Machina]]. A lot of postmodern writers seem to believe that. The worst part is they take the ''"How I learned to love the bomb"'' stuff seriously, and try to sell us on the notion that thanks to our own Dr.
*** No one has provided a feasible way for Adrian to be brought to justice at the confrontation in Antarctica. Veidt already pummeled Walter and Dan without breaking a sweat, and Laurie couldn't even finish Adrian with a gun. The person who actually outmatched Adrian was Jon, who is more or less down with Veidt's plan.
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** This troper thinks it was just a joke, really.
* What Just Bugs Me is reading all the [[Alternative Character Interpretation|Alternate Character Interpretations]] on Nite Owl II (is "Dan Dreiberg" his real name? could he be related to one of the older heroes? might he have been working as Veidt's lacky?? Could they be half-brothers?? ''could he have killed the Comedian??!'') in the Wild Mass Guessing that I didn't even think about while reading the book, and knowing this would make for some interesting background for him but that's impossible due to (1) the slavish devotion to the comic and (2) this thing isn't getting a sequal (probably).
** Dear God. If they make some kind of sequel to the Watchmen film the fans will start setting Hollywood on fire building by building, and I will be one of them.
*** Jeffrey Dean Morgan illustrated it well when he said that Hollywood would never make a sequal unless they wanted the actors to be murdered by rabid fans.
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**** Another alternative: maybe he doesn't catch the bullet from the initial shot at all. He catches its ''ricochet'' off a part of his armour that we haven't seen. A straight shot from a gun certainly has all its kinetic energy intact, but a ricochet is much slower and has less penetrating force. Hence the blood on his hand, getting knocked off his feet by the sheer force of the shot, and catching the bullet anyway with a mild injury to his hand (the bullet's bloodied in the book, remember). The bloodied hand is just to conceal the fact he's wearing body armour. As for the problem of Ozymandias remaining uber when everyone else seems to be aging, you might as well ask [[Frank Miller]] how the hell Batman isn't a complete arthritic wreck at 50+ and leaping off rooftops after roughly ten years of not doing that sort of thing. The answer for both Ozy and Batman is that they are constantly training, constantly honing their martial skills and constantly pushing to remain at their physical prime, even for their age. Ozymandias also adds terrifying intelligence to that equation, and his [[Curb Stomp Battle]] against Nite Owl and Rorschach has as much to do with him knowing them so well he can predict what their tactics will be: remember he messes with Rorschach's 'face' by messing his cowl; he knows Nite Owl is more about nonlethal takedowns and gadgets than physical skill, so he anticipates the mini-laser and Dreiberg giving him a chance to surrender first. Superpowers is one thing, but the world of Watchmen seems to anticipate that the average costumed hero has physical prowess and combat skills well above the average person; Ozymandias is just at the uppermost end of that spectrum - even Rorschach concludes that he can't imagine a more dangerous opponent, and that Veidt is faster than Nite Owl and perhaps faster than Rorschach himself.
** The "No Superheroes Except Dr. Manhattan" rule isn't a real "rule"
*** 1) Nowhere is it explicitly stated that other people with superpowers don't exist. We just haven't seen them. One argument is that the psychic's brain bit and the fact that everyone on Earth is psychically receptive, in fact shows that they do exist but everyone else is unaware of them. 2) Catching a bullet (at least from a low-powered gun) is not physically impossible in terms of the hand or body movement, but Veidt would either need ''absolutely'' perfect timing, or precognitive powers (because the bullet would move too quickly for his eyes and optic centre to process, let alone his reflexes).
**** I think the film did a nice job of explaining this by having Ozy wear gloves, which likely were Kevlar-based.
***** And the bullet is partly red, so it still hurt him a bit.
** I explain that in a much simpler way: Alan Moore is not only a user of mind-altering substances, but a mystic, who [
* I'm going to provide an alternative explanation: Alan Moore has admitted that he does everything in the first draft, partially as a result of the limits of the medium. The first parts are in print by the time that you're writing the end, so you can't go back and rewrite stuff. As a result, Moore wrote himself into a corner and needed a [[Deus Ex Machina]] to save the plot. This Troper's reaction to the finale of the comic was, "flying kung-fu and psychic powers exist? Since ''when?''"
* I read it as a sly joke, in the context of the rest of Watchmen at least. The whole thing is a serious deconstruction of comics as a whole, that culminates with the villain suddenly unleashing seemingly super-human level abilities despite being a normal. It's the kind of thing that wouldn't look at all out of place in most comics, yet comes completely out of the left field in Watchmen and is much more effective for it.
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* Why did Ozymandias kill The Comedian? It didn't look like he was going to do anything to stop him.
** He probably wasn't, but he ''might''
*** Ozy went after the Comedian because he was afraid that the Comedian might tell somebody about his plan. The Comedian had already told Moloch about it. Even though he wouldn't have interfered, he was also in such an unstable state that an unintentional leak was possible. Not to mention that Ozymandias might have held a grudge against the Comedian for beating him up decades earlier. Ozy let Dan and Laurie for the same reason he lured Rorsharch and Dan to his Antarctic base; he still values his friends.
**** Or because he was only afraid the plan was spilled ''before'' it was put on practice, when he could be stopped. After it was done, there's little chance they'd risk the state of peace they achieved for the truth, specially because it couldn't be undone, anyway.
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** As a reader of pulp stories from that time, yes. The D-word is thown around a lot.
*** It's mildly implied in some part of the book (I think it's some part of Under The Hood) that Silhoutte's murder may not have been a hate crime, but an attack on superheroes disguised as much, so who knows, perhaps the killer even had a bit of respect for homosexuals.
** The killer might have had idiosyncratic [[Even Evil Has Standards|personal standards]]
** This could be a case of [[Fridge Brilliance]]: ''Watchmen'' is set in an alternate universe, and there may be some subtle differences in language. Note that the lesbian characters in the comic never refer to themselves as "lesbians", but as "gay women". It's possible that in the Watchmen universe "gay woman" is the neutral term, and "lesbian" is a slur word, equivalent to how in our world "lesbian" is neutral, and "dyke" is a slur.
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*** Sorry for that being vague on that term. I didn't mean released as in intentionally set free, I meant released as in unbound. Not in their cells any more. What I was asking, though, was why the time was linked to the death of the guy in the hospital bed. I know the Boss guy had "privileges", but why were they all waiting for the guy to flatline, and if they weren't, what was stopping the from getting out of their cells earlier/suddenly allowed them to get out?
* Why does Veidt's
** That's something the actor did on purpose, as noted on the main page. In public, he practices a perfect News Anchor Accent. With a good friend, like Dan, he just speaks normally and naturally; he doesn't yet know why Dan's there, so he's just talking to an old friend. The one at the end is more in between, probably because he had planned the confrontation and wanted to make sure he was clear.
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** "Why does everyone expect Ozymandias's plan to fail?" Because peace based on a common enemy ALWAYS fails eventually.
*** But peace based on bringing nations together and convincing the people they're not so different doesn't have to.
**** That's not what Adrian was doing, however. His peace was, ultimately, based on Fear of the Other—he was just trying to change the 'Other' from 'the other nation' to 'something we're afraid will eat us both'. That's not a fundamental bringer of accord and mutual understanding, just a distraction. And distractions are not permanent.
** It might have something to do with the fact that Veidt's plan depends on him accurately predicting how people will react to the situation he's created. But just a couple issues before he reveals his plan, we have that whole scene on Mars where Dr. Manhattan realizes how utterly unpredictable people can be. Veidt may have thoroughly planned things through to the point where he's convinced the alien threat can end the cold war, but the whole thing is one "thermodynamic miracle" away from falling apart.
*** And yet the "thermodynamic miracle" that convinced Jon to return was a good thing (Laurie) that had miraculously and defiantly risen in the wake of a terrible thing (the Comedian's assault on her mom). Veidt's plan might have results which are unexpected, but that's not necessarily bad.
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== Rorschach's Journal And The Cliffhanger Ending (Spoiler) ==
* I have never understood how Rorschach's journal is supposed to represent much of a threat at the end of the story. Veidt controls most of the media, the ''New Frontiersman'' is a paper read only by right-wing nutjobs who don't tend to be taken seriously or liked even by the story's very emphatically Republican government, and Rorschach's public reputation is that of a paranoid psychotic, while Veidt's is practically saintly. It seems highly, ''highly'' unlikely that even if excerpts from the journal were published that they would do any ultimate harm to world peace, especially because all Rorschach said was that Veidt was behind it all. He didn't back it up with details or further explanations.
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*** Still, all he says is "Veidt did it". No how, no details, nothing. It's nothing but hearsay from a deranged sociopath, and that is not enough to cause any serious investigation.
** Personally, I always saw Rorschach's journal as being appropriate fuel for those unhappy with the truce between the nations. It wouldn't take much to inspire the disgruntled who resent giving up the fight against the U.S.S.R. Yes, it would be the journal of a murderous hobo, but lesser things have definitely inspired conspiracy theories, domestic terrorism, political campaigns, etc. Anyone looking for dirt on Veidt and bringing down the new world order would take it as gospel.
*** Funny how folks demonize anyone who wants to bring down Veidt, because it might restart the cold war. As Dr. Manhattan pointed out, his plan won't end anything. And American society, for one, was based on revolution in support of
**** Human beings are extremely stupid, reactionary, assholes. People shouldn't be "moral free agents, responsible enough to make their own, well-informed actions" because most human beings are irresponsible and don't give a damn about being well-informed, just told they're right.
***** On that note, watch Ozymandias when he confronts the closest thing to an omniscient source of knowledge that he can actually talk to and get an answer from (Dr. Manhattan, of course). Ozy isn't asking to be well-informed about things he does not know yet. He's asking to be ''validated as having been right all along''. The problem with starting from the assumption that 'people are fools and should not be allowed to make decisions' is that the alleged elite who 'should' be making the decisions for the people? Are capable of being just as foolish themselves. There is a reason Churchill made his famous quote about democracy being the worst system of government ever, ''except'' for all the other systems which were even worse.
*** In case you hadn't noticed, what happened ''last'' time the chips were left to "fall where they may" was the gigantic geopolitical clusterfuck Veidt was trying to solve.
*** Veidt took the steps he did not because he thought World War III was inevitable, but because it was ''imminent.'' Or so he claims, anyway. If the moral debate were simply "Aren't people entitled to even unpleasant truths, that they might make decisions accordingly?" I imagine it would be much easier. But when some of those people are in charge of nuclear warheads, it becomes more complicated. If the truth might end the world, I think it's justified not to let it get out.
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== Pirate Comics Vs. Superheroes ==
* Why is it that pirate comics have completely replaced superhero comics in this universe? just because something exists doesn't mean people will not buy comics based on them. And if the masked aventurers could collect image royalties for action figures, they can do the same for comics.
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*** To argue it another way, Policemen exist in real life- doesn't mean people don't watch police procedurals does it? As for fridge logic stuff like the above, well, watch an average episode of CSI- why did Grissom/Horatio/Mac do this stupid thing that serves to advance the plot but doesn't reflect the reality of policework? Doesn't matter, its just a TV show- same principal would probabley apply to media based on superheroes if they existed.
**** Point of order: in our world, police dramas are very popular, but police ''comics'' are not. Maybe in the fictional universe, superheroes are very common in TV fiction that we just don't get to see.
***** Dick Tracy was pretty durn popular for a pretty long time.
**** Possibly it's because superheroes struck an aspirational, yearning, psychological chord with the audience of a 'lower' form? And because, with real idol-figures walking around, it wasn't necessary to get that 'fix' from comics anymore?
** In ''Watchmen's'' world, costumed vigilantes are shown to have lost public interest/popularity after the Second World War, and have developed public resentment to the point of public violence by the 60s. It seems likely that, not only did the public become disinterested in the splashy exploits of costumed "heroes" (and remember, until Dr. Manhattan emerged none of these were "superheroes," they were just people in costumes beating other people up), but had probably had enough time to become skeptical of the idea that someone could just put a costume on and start enforcing whatever morals he saw fit. I think Hooded Justice was included as one of the original vigilantes for a very good reason: the reader is supposed to have a twinge of moral discomfort at the idea of a "hero" who is wearing the icons of racist lynchings. Someone like Rorschach, randomly wandering into "underworld" bars and torturing people for information, isn't likely to win sympathy from the wider public for very long. We like the idea of Jack Bauer, until we imagine the idea of actually being ''around'' Jack Bauer...
*** Hooded Justice is not wearing racist
*** In fact, the news vendor mentions that there used to be loads of superhero comics around - they just started dying out after the war. Hero comics still exist in Watchmen; they just haven't become the overpoweringly primary genre. It's also a dig at superhero comics themselves: the idea that the narrow field of 'pirate comics' would become the main genre seems really absurd, perhaps until we consider how bizarre the superhero genre is. It's [[wikipedia:Defamiliarisation|ostranenie]].
**** Indeed, in this universe superhero comics predate real
** There's also the fact that the Keene Act made superheroes something like outlaws, and superhero comics didn't feel like they were "escapist" anymore. Also, publishers might have wanted to avoid publishing books with such controversial subjects, especially when they are intended for a younger audience.
*** Very feasible, especially given that a large part of the resurgence of superheroes was the need to find a "wholesome" theme after censors began cracking down on the more ambiguous crime comics that had previously been popular.
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== How Would Dr Manhattan REALLY Have Affected The Cold War? ==
* While we're talking about Dr Manhattan - why, why, ''why'' can't the Russians try to replicate the experiment? Surely they have spies. If they can figure out how to build one of those Intrinsic-Field-Remover things, (and Ozymandias manages, so it can't be particularly hard or under wraps), they can keep MAD going. Sure, they may lose a hell of a lot of test subjects, but they ''need'' this in a way that makes moral concerns pretty much irrelevant. So again: why isn't there a Dr Arzamas-16?
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** You guys are missing the point here. Manhattan isn't a man. He's a ghost. A ghost with god like powers that are the result of all the matter in his body being turned to energy. Like all ghosts he can't move on. Think how tragic his death was. His (up to that point) one true love is standing outside watching him as he's about to die. she then abandons him because she can't bare to what him die. He's been abandoned. That's why he's haunting her. Why do you think that the first thing he did when he came back was visit her? He came back in the Cafeteria where she was eating, after her not being there since his death. SHE was the missing factor that stopped him from coming back before. How are you guys not getting this? It's the most obvious thing in the world. You can't just turn a man into Manhattan, you need to give them a reason to haunt you before throwing them into the chamber.
*** Umm...no. It's never implied that Jon's particular state of mind had anything to do with his becoming Dr. Manhattan. It was a fluke.
*** The book, at least, implies/explains that his
** When was it mentioned that the Russians had any idea how Dr. Manhattan was made? Wouldn't that be, um, classified?
*** There was a whole research center full of people who saw what happened over a period of months and were shocked enough to talk about it publicly. No real way to ensure secrecy retroactively when you aren't even sure at first what the secret ''is''.
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**** There is no way that the USSR wouldn't dig as deep as they could to get their own Dr. Manhattan. Honestly, the Russians were VERY good at intelligence gathering, and I'm pretty sure that they could have found out what they wanted to. For example, how much would they pay one of those government employees for even a vague description of the IFR machine? Finding out what happened wasn't their catch, it was replicating it.
**** And on top of that, who's to say they failed? The experiment could have easily have created a DR. Leningrad who simply looked at the hellhole Earth became and left to make new life, just like Doc M did in the end. The Reds would not want news of a failed attempt to counter the "lynchpin of america's defense strategy" to reach American ears, so they wouldn't tell anyone. Dr. Manhattan might not have been the only superman, just the only one dumb enough to stay.
**** It's mentioned in the comics that Dr. Manhattan warned the Americans that any attempts to make a second superman wouldn't
***** It could always be assumed that Manhattan was lying to prevent someone from becoming like him. Maybe he didn't want the government locking people in a chamber to be disintergrated in the off chance of making a weapon.
**** Personally, if this troper watched a man get disintegrated before my eyes because of a "safety feature" the first thing she would do would be to take the machine apart to make sure it never happened again. It might only be dismantled enough to make it impossible to get locked inside, but any change could have a big impact on the result. By the time Dr. Manhattan appeared again there might have been a lot of changes done to the machine that would prevent someone else from coming back.
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**** Well it's never actually said that the Russians didn't attempt to replicate it, but it's pretty heavily implied that Osterman's ability to re-assemble himself is based on his already strong understanding of the intricate detail of things from both his work as a watchmender and an atomic physicist.
***** So? Maybe if you go into the box you have a 1% or smaller chance of immortality, and a 99+ % chance of death. In the long run, those are the best odds available.
****** Since your physical condition going into the box doesn't matter, why not just use the box on people who are already about to die? <1% of odds of godhood and 99+% odds of death takes on a whole new context if my odds of death in the very near future, whether due to terminal cancer or old age or whatnot, are already 100%. And at least this way would be quick and without pain. Going to the old veterans' home and asking the guys in the terminal wing if they're willing to risk a slightly sooner death in return for a shot at becoming Captain Uberman would probably get you volunteers lining up down the hall.
** Perhaps Soviet leaders simply and ultimately couldn't accept the existence of not only a potential threat to their authority and power (as the ruling class of the Soviet Union would inevitably end up viewing an omnipotent, omnipresent God-like being walking around in their own backyard as being), but of their ideology? Soviet thinking, at least in public, is based around a classless, egalitarian society (of course, the reality didn't quite end up like that, but the Soviet government was ''very'' good at accepting two contradictory viewpoints simultaneously, to misquote Orwell), something which is a lot harder to
*** In any case, look at what the Americans ultimately ended up with Dr. Manhattan; a distant, uncaring figure who, for all the propaganda, couldn't give a toss about ideology and who sort of aimlessly obeyed orders whilst it suited him but then ultimately completely flaked out, leaving the Americans galloping up Diarrhoea Road without a horse and saddle in the process. No matter how brainwashed and fanatical they were before they went in the chamber, there's no guarantee that when he or she reforms the molecular structure of his / her body that Dr. Soviet is going to be any more willing to obey orders or devoted to the Revolution than Dr. Manhattan ended up being devoted to the United States. Any Soviet spies would doubtlessly gain information about Manhattan's psychological state and make-up (which would be much easier to determine and observe than the circumstances that lead to his creation) and would presumably pass this on, which would give the old men in the Kremlin pause for thought about how much control they'd ultimately have over their own God, given how enthusiastic they were about controlling their citizens.
**** It doesn't help that Jon Osterman was never much of a patriot to begin with. He spent his whole life doing what others told him to do. If he had had anything resembling a backbone, he would not have let his father push him into becoming a nuclear scientist. Nor would he have let the US government turn him into their pet god.
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== Alternate-Timeline Science, Economy, Etc ==
* Given that the corpse of the creature is mostly intact, wouldn't any but the most cursory examination of it reveal that its brain is basically human and that its biochemistry would indicate a terrestrial origin?
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* Here's what bugs me: this story in a world in which the United States, thanks to Dr. Manhattan, has commercially viable electric cars, and electric flying cars, for that matter, as early as the sixties, but this is also supposedly a world in which the economy is on the brink of collapse by the eighties. How does that make any sense? Also, how is the Cold War still going on? If we have electric cars, plus the ability to mass produce however much of any petrochemical feedstock we might want, you have to figure that the price of oil is close to zero. That means that, first, there's no Middle East crisis, and, second, the totally oil-export-dependent Soviet economy implodes at least a decade earlier than it actually did. Add to that the fact that America won the Vietnam War, and the United States wins the Cold War well before 1980. And not primarily because the United States would have so much more military power because of Dr. Manhattan. More because the United States would be the source of the flying cars and other technological miracles.
* Also of note, one of the reasons the Soviets collapsed in the 80s was due to the immense amount of redundant nuclear weaponry they had to make to match the Americans' non-
** And let's not even get into the degree of environmental degradation that would be avoided if we had Dr. Manhattan. Actually, let's get into it: no mining, strip or otherwise, for any minerals, when Dr. Manhattan can just create them. No industrial, chemical, or nuclear waste, when Dr. Manhattan can just turn it all into air, or water, or, for that matter, any useful substances we might want. And this is just scratching the surface. To be perfectly clear, a world in which we have Dr. Manhattan would be a paradise, not a hell.
*** We send him to fight commies, that's a pretty lame use for God. I think he's not being utilized as useful as he could be.
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** If you want basic economy theory, think of it this way: a capitalist economy is based almost entirely on supply and demand. The price of a particular good is determined both by how much people want it, and how much is available. Oil is considered a precious commodity specifically because there's a finite supply of it. So, what happens when God basically says, "you know what, here's enough oil forever. And if you use that up, I've got more."? ''Economic collapse''. There's no demand because the supply is in abundance. Everyone has what they need. The economy is fucked up because God is on the side of supply, and there can be no demand.
*** The economy in Watchmen is in bad shape because we won Vietnam. After losing a major war, a country's currency undergoes massive inflation. Germany after WWI was one of the worst examples, and as a result of WWII, Japanese still need thousands of Yen to buy anything. Same thing happen in our timeline's United States after Vietnam. (One reason Carter wasn't re-elected was that his administration wasn't very good at controlling it) while this is bad in the short term, having to pay a dollar and half instead of a 25 cents for a bottle of coke, and all, in the long term this was a good thing, as it helped to stabilize the downward spiral that the US economy had been in since the Post WII boom ended in the early 70s. Without the inflation of the late 70s, the Reagan era boom would not have been possible.
*** Do keep in mind that the film invented the whole sequence about Ozymandias creating generators to make infinite free energy out of nothing (somehow) using Dr. Manhattan-based technology. I don't remember that in the book at
*** An unlimited supply of oil would most definitely ''not'' result in economic collapse; it would be the
** Nixon just sucks at economic policy. The characters blame "Nixonomics" for the terrible shape the economy's in.
* ''Why'' did the intrinsic field subtractor have its indelible effect on Osterman? What part of that process granted him such power - and why didn't others attempt the same trick? Further complicating things is that, at Karnak, the same type of device is used to obliterate {{spoiler|Bubastis}}, another living creature. Does this imply it only works on humans, or that it was just a one-in-a-hundred-trillion shot in the first place? (We can probably safely leave out the bit in the film where it was used to vaporize a roomful of corpses, though.)
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** Well in the book it's shown that he does over-exert himself. One entry read that he had been awake for 50 hours. The next was that he passed out without removing the skin from his head. Living on sugar-cubes and coffee will do that. As for money, it's reasonable to think that he steals money off the corpses of his victims. They say he moves constantly as well, so he probably gets evicted a lot.
* If
** The human face and body are relatively symmetrical. The fabric might not be sensitive enough to respond to every tiny variance, so the result is fairly even all over.
*** Plus, [[Rule of Cool]]. It wouldn't be a Rorschach inkblot if it wasn't symmetrical. And when he gets kicked in the head, it isn't. But I see your point.
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*** Considering Moore is English, not all that surprising.
**** [[Two Words]]: Benny Anger. Everything about him comes across as a British BBC host/presenter.
** It's an [[Alternate Universe]], duh. Unless we all just happened to forget Nixon winning four Presidential elections in a row (and, y'know, superheroes). Fashions are different, history is different, technology is
*** Verisimilitude dictates that military traditions would be the same in the Watchmen setting because there is no reason for them to change. It's a clear case of [[Did Not Do the Research]].
**** Unless military tradition changed because of the victory in Vietnam. The film did have the flag folded into a triangle.
** Edward Blake was buried in his civilian persona. Therefore, no military funeral for ''him''.
* By the way, how does
** When did anyone say that his fingers were broken? They had to kill him because there wasn't enough time to cut through the bars (only the lock on the door).
*** Uh, right there on that very page, the goon says "He broke my fingers . . . "
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* Although Rorschach's mask is a veritable quagmire of unexplained mechanics, I'd like to know just how the hell he sees out of the damned thing, especially when he's apparently blinded towards then end when Veidt twists it around his face.
** I always thought the mask kept spots of black over his eyes, and that the black liquid was more translucent than the white one.
** Rorschach isn't blinded when Veidt pulls the mask round. Veidt has obviously worked out for himself that Rorschach is
* In the film version they eliminated the subplot of Rorschach getting an extra outfit from his apartment, instead, he gets his gear back from Dr. Long's case file. Okay, but he breaks into Dr. Long's office during the riot, waits untill Long gets there, then orders him to find it for him. But this is Rorschach we're talking about here! He's incredibly fast thinking and good at locating things quickly and easily, as evidenced by his search of Blake and Moloch's homes. Surely he could have entered the room, got his face, and left within a few seconds, particularly since they WERE RIGHT ON THE SHELF FIVE FEET AWAY FROM HIM! There was no need for him to wait for Dr. Long to get there.
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** Comics are not storyboards. Despite the appearance, comics are intended for a ''reading'' audience, not a ''viewing'' audience. Ask any artist who's worked in both media and he'll tell you the intent and the art in each are entirely different. That's even before you get into the "Fearful Symmetry" part of the story which has separate ''pages'' mirroring each other, something that no film can ever do.
* (Movie tie-in related) Does anyone know if any of the winners of the "Veidt Advertising Contest" actually ''had'' their commercials in the movie? I know [[YouTube]] played the
* Why is it that in the comic Dr. Manhattan asks someone "What's up?" at one point and at another point seems utterly unfamiliar with the expression, taking it literally and saying, "'Up' is relative; it has no intrinsic value"? Doesn't he experience all times simultaneously?
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* And I try not to think about Veidt's Magic Floppy much.
== What was the reasoning behind the big bad's secrecy-killings (spoiler) ==
* Veidt's methods for keeping his plan a secret seem all over the place. First, he kills his superloyal assistants, to make sure the plan stays secret. Then when two people who know part of his plan come to stop him, he doesn't bother killing them but instead tells them the rest, even though he could easily take them. Then Dr Manhattan shows up, and Veidth immediately tries to kill him, even though he's not sure it will work. And when it in fact doesn't work, he shows them that his plan worked, and they can't afford to kill him anyway without risking WWIII again. When one of the people announces he'll try to expose it anyway, Veidth declares he doesn't care. So WHY kill extremely loyal people, when you think even your enemies can't afford to betray you. Why try to kill a very powerfull being before trying to explain it to him, but ignoring a weaker man who announces he'll try to betray you anyway?
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* The Comedian taunts Hooded Justice- "Does this get you off?" Why does this make Hooded Justice so enraged? I've never read the comics, could someone expound on this?
** In the novel, Hood was implied to be homosexual. At one point it was believed that he took in boys from the street and beat and raped them. He probably got pissed because Comedian was making fun of this rumor.
* Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias) and Hollis Mason (Nite Owl 1) are supposedly the only two "Watchmen" who have ever gone public with their identity. The Comedian's mask barely covers
** Well, in the novel, at least, the Silk Spectres were public figures, by virtue of the first trying to use her publicity as a masked hero to jump start an acting career that never took off.
** From about the Second World War onward, the Comedian also spent most of his career as a government Black Ops operative doing all kinds of top secret stuff; he's not in the public eye as much, and no one really cares about his brief public career as a superhero fifty-odd years later.
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* Why is it spelled N-I-T-E Owl, not N-I-G-H-T Owl?
** Because poor literacy is KEWL
I'm going to bed now. Night night.
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*** Ha! I went to bed ''thirty five minutes ago''!
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