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Watchmen

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Would The Squid Plan Work In The End? (Book-Only) (Spoilers)

  • Ozymandias's plan is that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. will team up against the alien menace, and that will bring about a new era of peace. Wasn't that kind of exactly what happened in world war 2? And weren't the two countries at each other's throats the second it ended? Ozymandias's plan is crap.
    • The plan wasn't crap. The bomb, for lack of a better word, not only annihilated a giant city, it also sent out those psychologically damaging images and thoughts that caused people to become terribly afraid of the aliens. Without the added fear element it would be a terrible plan, but with the fear element it suddenly becomes far too plausible.
    • This is even pointed out to him, in the following paraphrased exchange:

Oz: But I did the right thing, didn't I? In the end?
Dr. M: In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.

    • I would argue there's a lot of possible meanings for that exchange. The WWII comparison isn't apt, because the threat they united against was defeated (as well, the leadership of the US changed to a less Soviet-friendly President in 1945). The "threat" in Watchmen can't be defeated since it doesn't exist and there's no current way for Earth to reach it. It's also worth noting that Ronald Reagan (hardly a USSR sympathiser) actually had publically revealed plans to put aside differences with the Soviet Union and cooperate with them in the event of alien attack, something Moore probably knew when writing the series. Ozymandias' plan could go wrong in several ways, and it's unknown how he plans to keep things together after his death, but it's hardly impossible to pull off in the short term.
    • The main flaw that this troper saw in Ozzy's plan was that unless there's a new monster popping in every so often, people will eventually just forget about it. So, really, he has to keep murdering millions every once in a while to keep everyone running scared. Of course, since Dr. Manhattan left, there doesn't even need to be an alien threat, since the US has lost its big advantage, and things will probably follow the course of real life.
      • From Ozymandias' point of view, is that necessarily a critical flaw? Besides, he can always create a new monster out in the middle of nowhere instead of causing mass destruction with each reminder.
        • This is why this troper thought The Movie's take on Ozymandias's plan was way more thought-through and plausible. He used a massive energy generator system built by a duped Dr. Manhattan to destroy several cites, not just New York, which had several much more believable side effects: it looked as though Earth had been punished by a Physical God for its warmongering ways (the energy signatures from the blasts could be traced to him); both the Soviet Union and the United States (as well as various countries not involved directly in the Cold War) were damaged, which makes neither nation likely to swoop in and attack the other; and fear of Dr. Manhattan would make an extremely potent deterrent to keep war from sparking up again.
          • Of course, the downside to the adaptation's version is that Ozzy was credited as the inventor of the generator system, making it that much easier for a conspiracy theorist or even a dedicated investigator to consider his involvement in the crisis as well. Really, all you'd need is a map and some push pins and the Manhattan attacks are very obviously Veidt's generator locations, which we see the U.S. government knows about. The "alien" had the great advantage of seeming to come from someplace utterly unconnected to anyone on or from Earth.
            • That's wrong thinking, because there was only ever ONE generator and it was at Antarctica. The viewers see Dr.Manhattan complete the first and only generator, in fact, the science team even celebrates its completion. In addition, they had just completed the generator THAT DAY, so nobody knows that Ozymandias actually finished the generator yet. The energy explosions were projected from the same generator, that's why there was a time delay between the destruction of every city. When the scene of the energy projection is shown on screen, the glass of the observation room doesn't break, which it would've had the generator actually blown up. Also at ground zero of the explosion in New York, the ball of energy centers on Times Square, and you can see there is no building there to house a generator.
              • The problem with The Movie's adjustment to the plan is not simply that the attacks "by Dr. Manhattan" could be traced back to Adrian. Which given that Dr. Manhattan was working with Adrian on duplicating his energy signature FROM A FEDERAL FACILITY is not terribly far-fetched. The issue is more one of Ardian's changed motives between graphic novel and movie. In one of his many Motive Rants Adrian goes on about fossil fuels basically being the root of all evil. While this makes sense in some ways (fossil fuels are in limited supply, thus creating scarcity and a motive for conflict), it was a non-issue in the graphic novels (as Dr. Manhattan and Veidt had long-since solved the energy problem in the graphic novels), and it doesn't even begin make sense given the alterations made to Veidt's plan. Now, he CANNOT use Dr. Manhattan's energy to break humanity's dependence on fossil fuels without potentially implicating himself in the attacks. Thus something he spends almost as much time ranting on in one scene as he does about war in the entire movie is now impossible for him to fix. The scarcity still exists, the energy crisis must remain in existence for Veidt's plan to be kept secret, and thus conflict will eventually resume.
              • You are all missing the point. The point is/was, that if we cause some wide scale destruction, and blame it on something intelligent, capable of intent and malice, and make that thing non-human, we will stop seeing one another as Italian, Black and gay, and instead see each other as Human, even if only to band together against this literally alien menace....and not having an actual alien menace, a new era of prosperity and cooperation results. Warhammer 40K is proof of the success of this sort of plan, in that a catastrophe in the ancient past convinced all of humanity to stop fighting with itself... less so in that it convinced all of humanity that the rest of reality needed to be subjugated, and they haven't stopped being space nazis since.
    • That's not really the point. The real point is to get everyone out of the "we have to destroy them before they destroy us" mindset and into one where they're willing to tolerate the continued existence of the other side. Once that shift has been made, it's very difficult to reverse.
      • Really? Do you have any evidence for your assertion that tolerance is a difficult state to get out of once entered? Because I'm pretty sure history would beg to differ with you, being a succession of conflicts between peoples who are even the tiniest bit different from each other, be it economically, culturally, religiously, etc. The point was to introduce something more different from humanity than its individual groups are from one another...something to attract our natural xenophoia. Keep in mind that on the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism Watchmen is about as far toward the cynicism end as you can get.
  • About Veidt's plan: His plan is to fake an alien invasion so that the US and USSR would ally and avert nuclear armageddon. All fair and good, but there's one major flaw; when a second "alien attack" fails to arrive, isn't there a major chance that the alliance will break apart and the world will be back on the road to nuclear holocaust? Or does he have a plan to ensure this doesn't happen that I just missed?
    • My guess is that this is part of the point. Veidt was incredibly short-sighted and didn't think about what would happen beyond his own plans and new marketing campaigns. Jon's final lines of "Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends" really drives this home for me. Veidt claimed moral superiority and believed that he was doing the right thing, but the plan wasn't really about saving the world. It was about proving just how clever and powerful he was. Veidt is the "smartest man in the world," but is a character driven by the "ends justify the means" thinking found in many superheroes, and Watchmen shows what that philosophy can lead to.
      • 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 half—thus missing the point, since Veidt idolises this as lateral thinking without realising that in doing so, it destroys the puzzle so it is irreparable, and that the Gordian Knot was more like a philosophical question than an actual puzzle to be solved as such. Alexander destroying the knot is sort of like being asked "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it actually happen?" and answering "Dunno. Let's cut all the trees down and find out." Similarly, Veidt's plan is short-sighted: he'll stop the war, maybe, but the consequences range from a One World Government to nuclear annihiliation merely delayed by a couple of years. He'll simply have to intervene again shortly down the track.
      • 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!"
    • Does no one recognize why he's called Ozymandias in the first place?
      • "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair! For I am Ozymandias, king of kings." For all his boasting, the Ozymandias in Shelley's poem was so thoroughly forgotten that only the engraving on the pedestal of a shattered statue remains to testify to his existence.
    • Interestingly, this is extremely analagous to something he says in his Motive Rant, that if the human race isn't saved from nuclear Armageddon then soon the only vestige left of it will be a plaque on the moon with Richard Nixon's name on it.
        • Which is terribly ironic given that the original Ozymandias - aka Rameses II - was responsible for a ridiculously large proportion of major Egyptian monuments and remains one of the most famous pharaohs to date.
          • And yet he's dead, most of those monuments are in various states of disrepair, his civilization is so dead that even puzzling out how to read their language was one of the most difficult problems of modern archeology, and only scholars and "Egyptophiles" even know much about him besides his name. Certainly your average schoolchild doesn't "tremble" or "despair" at his works except when forced to name them to pass a social studies quiz.
          • 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 own brand of condoms and was the 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—Rameses II is not dated anywhere near the time of Exodus). So while most of the general population may not be able to give specific details about the guy, his mark on culture seems to have been made. Just that Shelley wrote the poem about him is telling.
              • 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 us—including one day, despite his delusions, Adrian Veidt.
    • 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.
    • Alan Moore is considerably more charitable to the Soviet Union than you or I, and he expects his geniuses to take a similar line.
    • Also, there's no evidence that the Soviets were planning a nuclear attack on the US. Historically, the Soviets never planned a massive nuclear first strike against the continental United States- sure, they had plans for using nukes in a war with the US. And they certainly had (and used) plans for invading other countries. But they didn't think in terms of the same "we have to annihilate the entire enemy nation before they annihilate us, and the war will be over in a few hours" idea that influenced US nuclear doctrine.
    • Um. New York being blown up doesn't make all of the US's nuclear missiles magically vanish, nor does "bringing all their weight to bear" to repair New York somehow make it impossible for someone to hit a button and turn on an automated flood of ICBMs. The USSR was not ruled by nice people, but it wasn't ruled by * suicidal* people either. Indeed in many ways looking back on the history of the Cold War it was the USA that was by quite some degree the more risk-taking, adventurous hard line, push-us-to-the-brink-of-apocalypse superpower (and Watchmen largely exists as a commentary on this).
      • Bear in mind Manhattan's presence is said to fundamentally alter Soviet psychology on Mutually Assured Destruction, though: the theory being that since it's actually unlikely they can now inflict complete destruction on the US (Manhattan can stop maybe 80% of the bombs), they will simply die trying rather than be ruled, thanks to the depredations of the Nazis.
      • Russia was, in fact, ruled by suicidal people. They were quite literally trying to construct a doomsday weapon that would end the entire world if Russia got wiped out.
    • The Squid's psychic blast affected not just NYC but everyone with even the slightest bit of psychic sensitivity worldwide. It would be far more pragmatic for the USSR to side with the rest of the planet then try to take advantage of a paradimentional threat.
    • You're not even the only person on this page. And again, it's largely the point that Ozymandias's peace can't last. It's outright stated in the book by Jon.
    • When it comes to choosing between Americans and giant alien psychic squids, Soviet Union would choose America, I assure you. Aside from everything else, Soviet propaganda never really went out against American citizens; the demonization efforts were spent on American governmental system and the rich.
  • The Squid wouldn't have fooled anyone. As soon as scientists got their hands on the remains, they would have discovered it was based on the same organic chemistry as terrestrial life with DNA similar to human DNA. It contained no elements or compounds not found on earth and almost certainly had ratios of various isotopes that matched those found in terrestrial matter. Given that evidence they would not conclude that it came from some "alternate universe" or other alien world. They would conclude it came from Earth. Wackiness ensues as the US accuses the Soviets of biological warfare and the Soviets accuse the US of trying to create a new Dr. Manhattan. That's assuming they even wait for the tests, which if global tensions were as high as Veidt believed, they wouldn't. But they weren't and that was really the point: what Veidt did was totally unnecessary.
    • It's 1986. Don't you think that squid-crazy would work?
    • Does the original troper have some special way of distinguishing terrestrial matter for para-terrestrial matter? Because we don't know what an alternate universe would be like, we really can't say what something from said universe would be like. All we'd really have are the notes from the Institute for Extra-Dimensional Research, and it's very likely that Veidt was able to acquire any notes they had - if nothing else, he could have funded research on the condition that they provide him with the Cliff Notes version of their findings, and since he's the world's richest and smartest man nobody would complain.
      • Heck, he owns the institute, and it wouldn't be shocking if he did much of the work personally.
      • We know their universe has a sun, which is stable, and nuclear missiles, which are predictable. This must mean that nuclear physics works with a similar radioactivity system as ours. Therefore, there must be radioactive elements with long half-lives. And with these, indeed, we can see whether an object is terrestrial or not. Oxygen-16 ratios, Oxygen-14 Potassium-40, heck, even traces of Uranium can be used to identify what planet something is from. Oxygen-14 even tells you when the object was made solid (in other words, they would know the squid is only a few months old). What they would find is not one, not two, but dozens of different reliable dating techniques and origin analyses, all pointing to the same conclusion: the squid is terrestrial. And you don't need a superdeluxe trans-dimensional research institute to check for these things either. Radioactive ratio analysis equipment is something any chemical or physics research laboratory would have, and there's plenty of squid to go around. Any scientific community worth it's salt would see through the charade faster than you can say "Piltdown man".
        • 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.
      • 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.
    • Which is exactly part of Veidt's plan all along. US and USSR join hands to figure such questions out together.
      • But exactly what is Veidt's plan to convince everyone that the Soviet Union and the US uniting against this alien is functionally different from the two countries uniting against hurricanes and floods? There's really nothing to indicate that this is anything more than a random natural disaster that CANNOT be fought. There's no indication that the alien is from an intelligent race that knows how to get here and is malicious towards us.
        • That's what's so great about humanity. It might be seen as natural, but humanity would still band together to wipe out the entire species to get revenge.
  • Alan Moore basically acknowledges that Veidt's plan will fail by paralleling it with the Black Freighter story, right? A man realizes that his home is fated for destruction. The man decides he must do something to save the people he loves. He uses a literal pile of dead bodies to help save his home. A raw shark tries to stop his plan, so the shark must be killed. And in the end, it turns out that his home would have actually been safe, but his actions only brought death to the ones he loved most. Epic Fail. For the Black Freighter protagonist, and for Veidt.
    • No. The end of the story has Veidt talk to Manhattan about a dream he has - and that dream is the Black Freighter. The Black Freighter is Veidt's carefully concealed fear and self-doubt about his plan. Its presence in the story doesn't mean Veidt will fail. Rather, it underlines Veidt's humanity, that he actually questions himself, that he is serious about the guilt he says he feels about his action. No one else in the entire comic questions him, or actually really displays self-doubt or regret in any way, until Veidt makes them. (Even Rorschach does not feel that Veidt's actions are unneccessary. Rather Rorschach would prefer the world to be destroyed, for the perishing humanity to look up to him as he tells them, "told you so.") The movie changes things, of course, but I think this fact very important to the original work.
    • I mean, my overall view of Veidt is that we're looking at a world full of monsters. Of nihilists, or people who willingly blind themselves, of madmen that would kill billions to defeat communism/capitalism, of fools who either aid them directly, or re-elect them into office. Veidt's actually the only decent human of the lot, the only one who believes that humans can pull themselves out of the crisis that everyone else is sleepwalking into. Naturally he looks like a monster to them.
    • The keyfactor that drew the Cold War in an all-out war, unlike it was in the real world, is Dr.Manhattan, or rather, America's grown ego level with his presence. USA was convinced that Doc will ensure their safety and keep USSR scared of himself. Veidt knew that both do not apply. Not only Manhattan can't prevent nuclear destruction(USSR have more missles than he can counter) but soviets had quite an ego on themselves too, and they wouldn't tolerate America's behavior much longer. USA blindly led itself into an apocalyptic mess and needed it's eyes opened. Manhattan is trolled out from Earth and America makes Oh Crap face while Soviets realise that it's their chance. Both goverments understand that they'll end up blowing each other up, but their collective egos prevent them from stopping. As long as there's no excuse. That's where the "alien threat" comes in. It's an excuse to end the Cold War without losers. After "alien threat" will slowly fade, there will be no Dr.Manhattan, therefore no Ego Fuel to continue that crap. The world enters Modern Age. From my perspective, everything works just fine.

Would/Did Manhattan-Energy Plan Work in The Film? (Spoilers)

  • The 'real' flaw is as follows: a) you have a nigh-omnipresent hero who can be multiple places at all times. b) This person can DISSASEMBLE MACHINES TO THEIR COMPONENTS AND PUT THEM BACK TOGETHER. c) This person is also immune to nuclear waste. So what does he do? He disillusions the character, alienates him from humanity and the people he loves and FRAMES HIM FOR MASS MURDER instead of having him remove all nuclear material from all the nuclear warheads, and dissasemble said warheads into bicycles or something! And Ozymandias was supposed to be a 'GENIUS'?!? more like Too Dumb to Live or Nice Job Breaking It, Hero to me.
    • Don't be stupid. Dr. Manhattan isn't omnipotent. If he could do that, he would have, because he was affiliated with one side who put him through tests and the like. He can be confused by several natural things, including, by his own admission, massive electromagnetic pulses as well as tachyons.
      • Yeah. Dr. Manhattan didn't need Ozymandias to suggest something like that to him. It's strongly implied that if Dr. Manhattan just appears in a Russian missile silo and starts taking apart bombs, the Soviets will launch all their missiles- and they have so many not even he can destroy them all. We don't know how many places he can be in at once, either.
        • There are more ways to disable bombs than taking them apart in a big obvious way. If he were to teleport into a hidden place and start secretly turning all the uranium into iron, for instance.
          • This is adressed in the story. Even if he could stop many of the missiles, he couldn't stop them all. Even 1% would be enough to cause enormous damage.
          • No, that was refering to Dr. Manhattan's ability to intercept ICBMs in the air. He could try render warheads inert while they're still on the ground, however, it only takes 1 sighting of him disarming missles to put people on alert and he doesn't know the location of every missle on earth.
            • Errr, he has godlike clairvoyance and precognition. He could easily know the location of every missile on Earth if he wanted to. The only reason he didn't do it is because he didn't see himself doing it, and Manhattan never makes any attempt to escape his fated future until the very end. It's the same reason why he didn't save that woman the Comedian shot in front of him.
    • I personally found it incredibly stupid. Nixon says something like "we will fight them, and we will prevail". Is he out of his gourd? Fight Mr. Manhattan. You might as well try to fight Q, or sue God for damages. Heck, yelling at a cloud would make about as much sense. But in the movie, they all seem blind to that fact and cooperate for no reason. In reality (and it seems that Watchmen tries to be realistic), such a peace would last days, at most, since then, with no more sitings of Dr. Manhattan, they'd realize how silly their cooperation was and go back to a Cold War, a real one with deterrances and proxy conflicts without Dr. Manhattan's supernatural intervention. It also slighted the real differences between the US and USSR, and the seriousness of the capitalist/communist split and their opposing worldviews, thinking that a little ol' Enemy Mine was going to stop all US/USSR conflict. So, Ozymandias killed millions of people for no good reason in persuit of a truely crappy plan. In the words of Detective Del Spooner Ozymandias is "the dumbest smart person, I have ever met in my life!"
      • Right, so you think that both sides should have just decided it was hopeless and given up straight away? Dr. Manhattan is incredibly powerful, but not omnipotent - he himself says that he would "only" be able to stop about 60% of Soviet missiles if they were launched. Ozymandias, working alone, was able to come up with a plan that he believed had a chance of destroying Dr. Manhattan. It didn't work, but if he thought he could come up with a solution then the governments may just decide that all of their best scientists working together would have enough of a chance for it to be worth trying. Hell, Ozy could suggest a vague outline of his plan as something they should work on, he doesn't need to tell them it's useless.
      • Wanna bet there would've been a rash of Dr. Manhattan sightings around the world, even without Veidt's instigation? People in real life report sightings of Elvis all the time, and Elvis couldn't spontaneously appear anywhere on the planet he felt like turning up. As disproving such sightings would be effectively impossible, it's likely that governments would need at least a few years to convince themselves that they were just B.S. By then, the superpowers might've actually caught on that they can talk to one another, rather than trade threats.
    • May we burn the nonbeliever?
      • Above posters: let's keep the complaints about the movie and the book separate, shall we? Otherwise it just gets confusing and gives the fans heart palpitations.
      • The flaw with all of these complaints is that it assumes Ozymandias just sits back and allows events to play out after the big scary Gambit Roulette. Ozymandias is a professional Chessmaster. He explicitly states in the comics that he has a massive plan to slowly take over the entire world, East and West, through his multitentacled corporate empire, once the barriers to such a takeover erected by the Cold War have been dismantled by the big alien-invasion freakout. He talks about how the real nature of this plan is to "put aside Alexander" and "become Rameses"—in other words the end state of his plan is becoming benevolent dictator of the whole Earth. Note that in the comic book, the company that created the "dimensional gate" that the monster came through was owned by him—the governments of the world will now probably start throwing their entire defense budgets at "dimensional research" in order to find a way to ward against or counterattack the "alien dimension", and this is a field that Ozymandias has monopoly control over.
        • This is even clearer in the film version, where it's strongly established that the world's greatest expert on Dr. Manhattan's powers, other than Dr. Manhattan himself, is Ozymandias. Combine that with the fact that in the film Ozymandias releases a Manhattan generator providing unlimited free energy to the world right after Dr. Manhattan's "attack", and Ozzie is well on his way to owning all of the world's governments outright.
          • If this is his plan, then one wonders how he has managed to solve the problem of human mortality, given that the flaw of the Roman Empire, decay into corruption over the course of centuries if nothing else, will eventually bite him in the arse, and likely create, if history is any indication at all, a culturally-atrophying totalitarianist world superstate focused above all else on the preservation of its own status quo. In other words, once he himself dies, Veidt may have just damned the world to a Fate Worse Than Death.
              • The man built a machine that creates tachyons (particles that travel in time), perfectioned his body to an nearly impossible level (!he can catch bullets!) and engineered a source of energy similar if not equal to that of Dr. Manhattan. I really don't think death bothers him at all.
              • Considering his level of physical perfection and general total mind and body awareness, integration, etc., he probably thinks that when the time comes he'll have a chance at successfully copying Dr Manhattan's transformation. (Seems to me to be a more logical reason for owning another of those field subtractor thingimawhatsits.)
  • In the movie, why did Ozymandias need to blow up so many cities in order to create world peace? Specifically, an explosion of that magnitude in Moscow, attributable to the USA's pet god (even if it wasn't actually Dr. Manhattan) would have gotten every Soviet nuke in the air as soon as anyone could press the big red button, and there would not have been time to broker a peace. Just hitting New York would have gotten the ball rolling without pushing twitchy Russians over the edge. I never would have thought that a giant psychic squid would have been a more plausible ending than anything.
    • Because, to be blunt, we've already seen New York (or at least the most prominent structure in it) get blown up, and it didn't unite anybody for longer than about a week.
      • That's because in real life, you had 19 Muslim fanatics mount a kamikaze attack on the World Trade Center, and took out less than 5000 people. In the movie, Ozymandias uses tech developed by Dr. Manhattan to cast the fucking Dragon Slave on a dozen cities worldwide, and racks up several megadeaths. It's easier to unite the world against a suddenly inimical god than it is to unite the world against Islamic militants—especially when over a billion people consider themselves adherents of Islam.
        • As a Muslim I take extreme offense to that. It makes it sound like all the billion of us support militarist and terrorist Islam. If you would like for me to take you to school on such misconceptions, I've done it a million times before. But I'll be kind and assume you were just being callously sloppy with your wording.
      • It creates a less "New-York-is-the-center-of-the-universe" feel to it, and makes it slightly more plausible that all the nations of the world would get together a hug under one giant Americo-Soviet hegemony. Remember that the Soviets are really nasty bastards in this story but they're not suicidally insane—there's no point in sending nukes flying to kill Dr. Manhattan himself (or they would've done it already), and there's no point in blowing up Dr. Manhattan's home country when Dr. Manhattan has apparently already done that.
      • That said, his decision to target Moscow (or any other Soviet city) in the movie was still kind of risky and dumb (see above).
      • I don't see any evidence that the Soviets (or even Nixon for that matter) are villains of this piece, or that either side was any worse than Real Life. The presence of superheroes simply dictated both side's responses differently and provided fuel to the hard-liners on both sides.
    • Consider what would happen if Veidt left Russia out of his plan. Suddenly you have several cities around the world destroyed ostensibly by Dr. Manhattan, who's just had an apparent falling out not necessarily with Earth, but definitely with America, and America's big foe in the Cold War remains untouched by Manhattan's apparent attack. What's the US going to think about Manhattan's loyalties (and the idea of making peace with the USSR) after that?
  • In the film, Ozy substitutes Dr. Manhattan for the fake alien invasion. The idea still being that if he gives the world a common enemy, they'll unite to fight against it. But everyone in the world thinks Dr. Manhattan = America, so the movie-Ozy's plan should CAUSE nuclear armageddon, not prevent it.
    • The world knows, however, that Manhattan abandoned the US and humanity for Mars, his very absense destabilizing the US's hegemony. So no, they wouldn't associate "Manhattan"'s attacks on several American cities and several foreign cities to be the actions of an American agent. Not a plot hole.
      • Yes, still a plot hole (and the one that bothered This Troper the most about the changed ending). In the history of the cold war, every time the United Staes made a major blunder, the communist countries would draw tighter against us. Letting our blue, naked, weaponized man go rogue and start blowing stuff up certainly wouldn't have caused anyone to sympathize with us, or given us allies. Most likely, Ozy's new plan just would have turned the entire situation into "the world vs. the US" more, either from suspicion that we planned it and already backstabbed our own populace, or we're too incompetent to be trusted. IJBM
      • Nope. The movie explicitly implied the Soviet Union viewed Manhattan as a threat as well. It's still not a plot hole.
    • EXACTLY. That's the biggest flaw in the whole "movie vs book" argument about the ending. Blaming Dr. Manhattan, who has been a very prominant American, despite his trip to Mars, and assuming the Soviet Union, let alone the rest of the world, is going to not question it? Besides the fact, why would they have a reason to believe it's not a trick? What was the real motivation for Manhattan to do such a terrible thing anyway? "Well, the Americans recognize it as his power signature, so we MUST believe them!" Yeah, in 1980's Soviet Union (even Alternate Soviet Union), I seriously doubt they just accepted that one at face value. Granted, the squid idea was a little weird, but at least an outside force not connected at all to any antagonist would be a better argument for "Us Against Them."
    • I think the fact that AMERICAN CITIES got completely destroyed is a pretty good reason to believe that it's not a trick. No government would greenlight the destruction of their own major cities just for a political power play. I think that given the fact that Dr. Manhattan had abandoned the US, plus the fact that there would plenty of testimonies from US officials and Veidt (as mentioned above, the leading expert on Dr. Manhattan) of Manhattan's dissalusionment of the US Government and human life in general, and the distruction of cities across the world including the US, the idea of Dr. Manhattan going rogue and attacking the world independently of the US would be pretty easy to argue to any skeptical Russians. The only real issue I have with the movie ending is that it make Ozy's Gambit Roulette an even bigger gamble than it was in the book, considering he had much less control over Dr. Manhattan's action's than he did of the squid project in the GN, and so the "Just As Planned" momment falls a little more flat. Seriously, they had to do quite a bit of tweaking to make the new ending believable, but I think—at least for me, anyway—they ultimately succeeded.
      • Also, the Soviets almost certainly have enough data on Dr. Manhattan's energy signature (their allies saw him in action in Vietnam, and if all else failed spies could have gotten access to American files) to verify that part for themselves.

Is Rorschach's Absolutist Worldview Good? Or Bad? (Y/N)

  • Rorschach is supposed to have this unyielding moral code - if someone does something bad, they are a bad person, period. The only correct response to evil is to obliterate it. So why does he oh-so-casually brush off the Comedian's attempted rape of Sally as a "moral lapse"? True, he wasn't so unbending when he met the Comedian, but he could easily have gone after him following his psychotic break.
    • Well, he has some pretty weird views about women and sex, having been brought up by a prostitute who appeared to care more about the johns than about him. Maybe he thought Sally "had it coming to her"?
      • Yeah. That kinda shows when he comments the lesbian chick's death as her being "a victim of her own indecent lifestyle". He calls Sally a "bloated whore", so he probably thought she kinda invited Comedian's actions upon herself.
  • Because Rorschach as a character is an exploration of passionate political ideals, and with that necessitates hypocrisy. (Not to mention, every character in Watchmen is hypocritical and short-sighted. It's the human condition.) He detests criminals, yet he is one. He defends women and children, but detests them. He's moved to tears by what Veidt does, yet idolises Truman for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
    • Rorschach does not detest children, and I really can't imagine what could possibly give you that idea. It's the other way around. The one thing in the world that he can't stand, the one thing that can make him lose his cool, is the idea of children suffering, scared, being abused. "Personal reasons," he says (hinting to a link to his own childhood), and remember: his failure to save the Roche girl from a horrible ordeal and death is what turned him from Kovacs into Rorschach.
  • As for the disconnect between rape being a crime and the Comedian, his idol (and remember, he sees everything as black and white. Positive associations with the Comedian means that any negative ones should be ignored.) being a rapist; perhaps he doesn't view crimes committed by costumed heroes as crimes at all, he and his own are above the law.
    • I personally find Rorschach's code to include his intense loyalty to costumed heroes, his "fraternity." It also wouldn't surprise me if Rorschach took the misogynist view that Sally actually initiated the attack considering his views that all women are whores.
      • He also may not have believed it really happened. Even though he mentioned his not speculating on Blake's moral lapses, he asked Laurie if she supported the 'allegations' Hollis made in his book. Given he admired several aspects of The Comedian, he may have felt there wasn't enough proof to condemn him.
        • Rorschach loves America. The Comedian fights on the side of the American government, therefore The Comedian is good rape and pregnant baby-momma-killing aside.
      • This troper wouldn't call Rorschach a misogynist. He treats the current Silk Spectre much more respectfully than he does anyone else, and we see him taking great joy in beating the crap out of a would-be mugger/rapist/both.
        • Still he call her mother a whore, for no good reason. I think the respect he has for SS2 may be because she had a big blue boyfriend that could disintegrate him on the spot, so he is not stupid.
        • There are a number of instances where it is indicated that Rorschach/Walter Kovacs is made disgusted and uncomfortable by female bodies and therefore by extension women themselves - consider the scene where he says he took the dress and "cut it until it didn't look like a woman any more". Whether or not this constitutes misogyny per se, he is still not entirely rational on the subject of women. (Additionally, Rorschach strikes me as the kind of person who holds to "it's the law and lawbreakers must be punished"-style beliefs. Rape is against the law, so how he personally feels about women likely doesn't enter into it.)
        • He says his job in a clothing factory is unpleasant because he has to handle women's underwear. Rorshach is asexual, not misogynist. A misogynist would revel in the touching of female underwear because he'd view it as a sexual object on par with an actual woman.
          • Rorschach doesn't hate all lawbreakers, he _is_ one. He openly defies the Keene act and seems quite proud of it. In fact, the first person he kills after the Keene act was a serial rapist.
          • Rorschach hates rapists * because* he is uncomfortable with femaleness. Not with "women" as a class of people, necessary, but with sex and sexuality, due to his experiences with his mom. All sex makes him uncomfortable, but the less "normal" the sexuality, the more deviant it is, the more it pisses him off.
          • 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 morality—there is no foolproof, objective method for drawing the line between black and white. People look to absolutist definitions of good and evil for comforting certainty but in practice those definitions, no matter how hard you try to cleave to traditionalist orthodoxy, shift and warp constantly... kind of like a Rorschach blot.
      • 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.
        • Well, clearly you hate the Comedian, seeing as you want to stab him in the nuts and all.
        • This troper disagrees with this sweeping assessment. The Comedian's crime involved attempting to force his sexual member upon an unwilling victim; the humiliation and pain caused by an injury to said body part seems a logical deterrent to future misuse of it. This does not "prove" that the previous troper hates the Comedian.
  • Back to the subject of Rorschach, I felt as though his politics were only incidental to his philosophy, and that he was probably the character with the most integrity out of any of them. Rorschach is an example of someone who many of us disagree with on a lot of things, but also someone that at least this troper can respect for his uncompromising integrity. Misaimed Fandom, yes, but Rorschach was definitely the most interesting character in the piece.
    • This troper feels that that's not supposed to be a controversial fact about Rorschach. Everyone is forced to respect that Rorschach, at least, has more integrity than anyone else in the cast put together. This troper feels forced to ask the question, though, of whether Rorschach isn't a demonstration that integrity in and of itself is not the end-all and be-all of morality, and if too much integrity is a bad thing.
    • It really seems the respect that people have for Rorshach is intentional, and not Misaimed Fandom, think about it, isn't this the exact thing Alan Moore would do? His work often goes Beyond the Impossible doesn't it? You can just see Alan sitting there thinking "I'll take you're philosophy, Deconstruct it in this character, make him into a violent sociopath, and then make him a likeable tragic figure. That'll fuck with you're heads! I'm a bloody genius!"
    • Rorschach's not so much "right", IMO, as he is trying to live with simple, direct values. On the surface, it's easy to take comfort in the idea that good and evil are distinct, and never mix. God knows, I'm tired of "compromise", and I'm barely into my 30s. That said, reflecting on Rorschach reveals the downsides: he's dehumanized himself so thoroughly that he almost never speaks in the first person, refers to the mask as his face, and still hasn't washed the blood off the trenchcoat he wore when he killed the dogs. He's also dehumanized virtually everyone around him: in his world, everyone is a whore, scum, or the object of his worship. The only other character he seems to vaguely appreciate as a human being is Nite Owl. While he's not the monster some people paint him as (see how he treats Moloch after finding out why Moloch possesses an illegal drug), he's also oblivious to the harm he causes even people we as the audience arguably find good, like his psychiatrist.
    • I don't think Rorschach cares much about the harm he causes others. "No compromise, even in the face of Armageddon," and all that. He took up the role of a masked crime-fighter not to protect the innocent, but as an attempt to deal with what he felt was the disturbing world around him (actually, none of the "heroes" in Watchmen took up their roles to protect the innocent, if you think about it). I think it's pretty obvious that Rorschach is a pretty disturbed individual, and he's going to mentally rewrite events to suit his personal narrative.
  • 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, that humans are savage in nature, no matter how you try to dress it up. They have very different views on how to deal with this problem though.
      • 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.
  • Hurm...

It appears to me that most tropers don't understand that Rorschach's unyielding moral "absolutism" is firmly based on absolute relativism. Reread his monologue to Doctor Long. It's very plain and clear. "This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces." "Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose." "Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. There is nothing else." And finally: "Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world. Was Rorschach." This is, well, conclusive. There are no two readings. Rorschach is an atheist and an existentialist, he realizes the inherent subjectivity of the human experience of morality and believes there are no moral absolutes whatsoever. Therefore, as we live in a morally blank world, with no meaning and no pattern, he is free, as free as everyone else, to upheld his own sense of right and wrong every time he clashes with society. And that's exactly what he chooses to do, certain of his freedom, with unyielding determination, even in the face of Armageddon. Absolute moral relativism that leads not to nihilism but to existentialism, that is Rorschach's way of thinking.

I must say, Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus would have been proud of him.

Which Character Is The Least Screwed Up ((Spoilers!))

  • Hollis Mason, aside from being dead. Yeah, he's not a MAIN character, but he's still important and fairly awesome.
    • And even he says it takes a pretty extreme personality to put on a costume and beat people up.
  • 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 Owl—who has the most recognizably human motivations of anyone in the cast—as being a "whiner who quit when the going got rough" because he chose * not* to spend his life in a quixotic battle of violence and bloodshed, because he aspired to some kind of normalcy, says something about you (and the comic book fans who agree with you). The fact that Rorschach seems sympathetic to so many people because he * denies he has* human failings or human weaknesses or the natural, human revulsion toward violence and conflict says something disturbing about the comic-book archetype Rorschach embodies.
      • "...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 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.
      • Well—there's also the fact that, whether this was an intentional real-world parallel or not, the major powers DIDN'T blow up the world, either there or here. From time to time in our history there have been panics in which certain people have been convinced that, for example, nuclear war was about to begin between the US and USSR. It never happened, in large part becaue the Soviet leadership was amoral but rational and did not care for the idea of being unquestioned masters of a radioactive cinder. "But the world is about to end" is never an appropriate excuse for nihilism. Whether Alan Moore intended to make this particular point is doubtful, but it's one of the things that jumped out at me re-reading it after the end of the Cold War.
        • 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, before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
    • Also note that this is a personal thing. Every character has good and bad sides, and for you that balanced out with all characters but Rorschach as unlikable, while for this troper everyone but the Comedian ended up as good (if flawed) guys.
      • I agree with you on all of that.
        • What disturbs this Troper is that anyone would sympathize with Veidt and regard him as a flawed good guy. That, and the events of the past 8 years, suggest to me that Alan Moore was not far off in his cynicism about human nature and moral hypocrisy. Just take a look at the ret-conning of the Iraq war in the past year, for instance...
          • This panel Suggests that Veidt had no qualms about his absolute annihilation of millions of people. This Troper thinks that those who are sympathizing with Veidt probably saw the movie version as a more accurate portrayal; he actually shows remorse and doubt, humanizing him about his extremist actions.
          • What? Sorry, but I think you're missing the point with that one. In that panel, Veidt is reacting to the news broadcasts shown in the previous panels that were describing a peace treaty between the US and USSR and and immediate end to the war. Veidt isn't reacting to the millions of deaths that he caused, which, after all, he had already done 35 minutes ago. Veidt is so happy in this panel because after decades of planning and organizing and gambiting, he did what was trying to do all along: saving the world. I think the comic makes Veidt quite sympathetic, although YMMV, and there's still plenty that Veidt has to answer for. This Troper sympathized the most with Veidt in his conversation with Manhattan after Manhattan killed Rorschach:

Veidt: Jon... I know people think me callous, but I've made myself feel every death. By day I imagine endless faces, by night... Well, I dream about swimming towards a hideous... no. Never mind. It isn't significant. What's significant is that I know I've struggled across the backs of murdered innocents to save humanity.... But someone had to take the weight of that awful necessary crme.

    • This troper, who has slightly strange thought processes, can't help but think of Rorschach's view of the world as very similar to, of all people, Sam Sprinkles from Zebra Girl. Yes, I am aware I am comparing a psycho vigilante to a giant talking cartoon rabbit. Hear me out, please? In both cases, a truly nasty childhood led the character to retreat into a black-and-white, idealistic world where they could actually effect things and their problems weren't important. The biggest differences are in method: Sam worked to increase the good, while Rorschach tried to eliminate the bad. Sam was forcibly snapped out of it when he was fired, but Rorschach, working outside the law, could just dig himself into the fantasy even further. Even so, they actually end up in a rather similar state- wandering the streets, dead broke and nonfunctional. Just Sam's drunk and cynical and Rorschach's insane and a very warped idealistic.
    • I've always felt a lot of sympathy for The Comedian. Apart from the rape, every other questionable moral he has can be put down to a twisted result of depression due to being denied a relationship with his daughter. His two scenes with Laurie Juspeczyk are quite emotional, mostly down to Gibbons' true skill in drawing his facial expressions.
      • 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 daughter—the rape of Sally Jupiter comes as the * result* of a long period of time where he's found that violence can get him anything he wants. He transitioned to callously murdering innocents in the pay of the government probably well before he found out about Laurie, too. The Comedian is a lot of things, but don't insult the character by claiming everything bad about him comes from one traumatic incident late in his life.
      • 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 Kramer
      • I despised the Comedian the more I read, but... I really felt bad for him when he broke down in front of Moloch.
        • That was probably the intention. He's a reprehensible human being, but he's still human, and he still has emotions and the ability to feel pain or sadness or horror.
    • I kind of saw Rorschach as the "special child" of the group. Especially in the most recent timeline, when they're past their prime, he causes a lot of trouble for them and they sort of have to "put up with him" the way you kind of have to treat a problem child. Only instead of throwing tantrums about wanting to go to the toyshop or get some ice cream, he wants to go and break the fingers of criminals in seedy bars. The bit where Nite Owl tells him off for being such a burden to them is kind of a good example of this (he and Silk Spectre are like the parents who need some damned time off for just a minute). But then that's the fun part of Alternative Character Interpretation, I guess. :)
      • Agreed. Notice that when Nite Owl lost his temper, he apologized when Rorschach really is kind of a crazy person. He didn't necessarily need to apologize, but there is the guilt there: Rorschach is deeply broken, and there is a certain pity there.
    • The troper I am replying to is Rorschach himself and I claim my five pounds. I note that you make no mention of Silk Spectre. Oversight, or are you just writing her off because she's a woman? Very Rorschach-like.
  • On the subject of Veidt, he isn't expecting the whole world to line up and sing "Kumbaya", you guys. He even says in that one interview with Doug Roth in the comic that he thinks humanity would stagnate under a utopia. What he was trying to do was stop two major powers from getting ready to kill each other and destroy everybody else in the process. I don't think he was anticipating perfect peace from then on, just the idea of a world where you knew you wouldn't get vaporized tomorrow. (Full disclosure regarding my morality and worldview and stuff: it's safe to say that if I were in the story and got ahold of that journal somehow, the last few pages would have included me burning it and muttering "Veidt, you son of a bitch, you have no idea how much you owe me." in the last panel, over a shot of the pages starting to curl in the fire.)
    • Well, let's just look at it this way, What happens if we extrapolate Watchmen into the 90s? The Soveit Union is gone, everyones in constant fear of an alien attack, and Rorshach has inspired a whole new wave of violent superheros (Remember at the end where Laurie says she wants to get a black costume, and a gun?) Basically the same thing that happened in our 90s. How is that Utopia?
      • ...I think you might have just came up with a great idea for a sequel.
      • And of course there are people who are inspired by the Veidt method to fully develop their potential. And how would they react to the leather-clad thugs running loose on the streets?
      • I always assumed that the reason Laurie wanted a black costume and gun was meant to confirm the fact that she has accepted who her father is, his influence on her life and her as a person, and is willing to let that become part of her. Note that by the time Laurie was a superhero, the Comedian wore a black costume, armor and carried a gun.
      • I took her change of costume to mean that she was abandoning her former Stripperific costume for something more like what the men wear (black) and something more practical (a gun), leaving behind the stereotype of the female superhero. Moore had already deconstructed the way female superheroes are portrayed, and I took Laurie's comment as part of that. Why can't a female super hero dress in armor and carry a weapon like a man?
  • I'm starting to agree about Dan being a bit screwy as well. Despite being the more "normal" person, it strikes me that Dan just doesn't value their friendship as much as Rorschach. Rorshach even states explicitly that he knows it's tough being his friend with the awkward handshake (Dan's probably his ONLY friend). They take a trip to the Arctic to stop Veidt. Then the whole NY thing happens, and everyone's kind of gobsmacked. Dan knows Rorschach is leaving and very distraught, yet he doesn't offer him a ride home, or do anything to make sure he's all right. Instead, Dan sleeps with Laurie. I know Dan couldn't have known that Rorshach would die, but he has no excuse for leaving Rorshach in lurch.
    • Dan always struck me as being rather naive, a case of The Cape (trope) becoming powerless because he's too tied to his ideals and too afraid to do anything. I think that naivete and a willlingness to believe in good in everyone is part of his relationship with Rorschach, which seems to be born more out of pity than actual friendship. He tries to be nice to Rorschach because he feels sorry for him, and he's the only one who can tolerate being around him, but they're not exactly friends in a real sense. I mean, could YOU be friends with that guy? If Dan had really gotten to know Rorschach he might have been able to do something to help him before he totally snapped. But it's pretty obvious that Dan doesn't really know Rorschach or what's going on with him, nobody does. They all didn't know how crazy he was until it was too late.
    • And to be fair to Dan, part of the reason Rorschach admits that he knows it's hard being his friend is because Rorschach is a huge dick to Dan. Let's not over-idealize here; for all that Rorschach may value his friendship with Dan, he still breaks into the guy's apartment numerous times, sponges off him, steals his food, expects the guy not to inform the police that a known killer has stopped by and, despite doing all of this, insults the guy to his face. It's only because Dan finally gets sick of putting up with Rorschach's shit and calls him out about it that Rorschach is moved to acknowledge this in the first place. Kind of hard to value that particular friendship too highly. As for not giving Rorschach a lift home, Dan is also very distraught, having failed to prevent millions of people dying and being forced to secrecy about it by the threat of global-nuclear holocaust; he's a bit overwhelmed himself, and Rorschach doesn't exactly reveal the extent to how overwhelmed he is.
  • So basically, this whole thing is just a huge elaborate version of the Robin Hood Morality Test.
  • I'm going to have to go with Silk Spectre as least messed up, and Dr. Mahattan as most messed up. Reasoning: Silk Spectre is easy; she isn't running around killing everything. She has some obvious Mommy/Daddy issues to work through, as well as some problems with self-image and commitment, but over all, she isn't in half bad shape. Dr. Manhattan is easily the most messed up because he has completely lost touch with humanity. He started life as a human, yet by the time Ozymandias impliments his plan, he has completely lost touch with emotion in general. He regards life and death exactly the same. He has become a God, yet it has made him uncaring. Like the other Characters are messed up, but at least they still feel, still look at people as something more than a fancy collection of particles.
  • I'm gonna go wild here and say that Dreiberg is the least messed up. Sure, he may be somewhat lame, but he's got no thick issues. His mother wasn't a prostitute, or raped. His father died when he was older, and I think peacefully. He's not really the guy you'd want saving your ass, but he's the guy you'd want to hang out with sometime. The character with the least mental problems seems to be him. Seeing as how Veidt has a little of a god complex. Manhattan is a self-aware force of nature. Silk Spectre II spent most of her adult life hating a man who was her father, and who tried to rape her mother; has no life skills beyond being a superhero, and was pushed into that life by her mother. The Comedian is... the comedian. And Rorschach is... well Rorschach. Nite Owl II is easily the least screwed up main character. If you pick side characters, that guy walking on the street seems to have a normal life.


Quantum Determinism, Dr Manhattan, and Alan Moore's Philosophy

  • 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.
    • 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, 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 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.
            • Does anyone else get the impression that Moore is, in fact, just quietly and benevolently taking the piss out of everything? Like the Comedian, but minus the sadism.
              • Be nice if he'd take some out of himself at some point.
  • (Back to the original question about Quantum Determinism and Dr. Manhattan's motivations) --
    • Ok, but even so, how does the knowledge that a twisted nihilist tried to rape a woman at all break his 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 Aesops, nor should you assume that any of the characters' decisions, reactions or beliefs neccessarily represent Moore's own. The book is far too complex for that.
      • 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.
      • Interesting that the particular case of "the randomness of life" in question had something negative (the relationship between Edward Blake and Sally Juspeczyk) resulting in something positive (their daughter Laurie). Shortly afterward, Dr. Manhattan is confronted with the actions of Adrian Veidt, which are again a case of something negative (the destruction of a city) resulting in something positive (saving the world).
      • So let me get this straight - Dr. Manhattan gave up on his all-knowing passive role once he realized he still doesn't understand women?
        • Or, rather, that he doesn't understand people. Dr. Manhattan has tremendous knowledge and can control pretty much anything made out of matter. Like the Discworld Auditors, he can count every atom in the room. This naturally leads him to believe that the world is purely deterministic (which it quite possibly is) and that everything is simple and superficial. When you know how a thing works, it tends to lose its glamour and mystery, and Dr. Manhattan knows how almost everything works. Seeing something so weird happen to people he believed that he understood teaches him a lesson.
        • Unfortunately, Dr. Manhattan is explicitly supposed to be "based" on quantum physics, which claims that the inner workings of the universe are entirely random. It seems like a huge mistake/oversight to give such a character an Einstonian worldview.
          • Um. That's going a little too far into it, methinks. A lot of people misunderstand quantum physics as some kind of "disproof" of determinism, when it is no such thing. Without getting too far into it, I'll just say that quantum physics is * very much* about finding predictable, repeatable rules that generate consistent results for the same starting conditions. It could hardly be a science otherwise.
        • I see no evidence for Sally's kissing of the picture as meaning she regretted having the affair with Comedian; the kiss seemed to be a very blatant statement that she loved (if not more than loved) the bloodthirsty sociopath, and violently pushed him out of her life only to prevent her daughter from learning about the way she, even to the last, emotionally leaned.
  • If Manhattan can see everything in the future, then that means the future is predetermined. But how the fuck can you write an alternate history where the future is predetermined? If it was predetermined then how can it diverge from the "real" world. If it's predetermined events have to follow only one possible route. A predetermined route renders the whole point of alternate history moot.
    • Manhattan exists on a level where he can be at every point of the universe at once co-existingly in both the future, the past and the present. That's how he manages to engage in a threesome with Laurie while doing several other vital tasks. For him time does not exist. This is heavily suggested by him in the scene with the photograph.
      • Umm no, he does not co-exist at every point in the universe at once. His consciouness exists at every point of his personal time stream at once. He knows everything that will ever happen to him, and everything he will ever do, but his knowldge is limited to that which he observes/will observe/has observed around him.
    • I would be interested to know what other scenarios the initial poster deems offensive.
    • The alternate history is predetermined differently to our universe. There's no conflict- it's just saying, "This is what would've happened if this had gone differently." You could argue that it's different right from the start, but it's still an "alternate history"- it just breaks off at a different time.
  • 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 deterministic—the wave function of a macroscopic object is too small to be measured by anything or interact with anything, much less be in superposition with anything else). Dr. Manhattan is clearly not supposed to be omniscient, but "only perceiving his own future" doesn't actually change much about his powers—it means he only knows the events along his personal timeline he could perceive, not everything that's going on in Alpha Centuari or the other side of the galaxy. Certainly given how important he is to world events, his future basically is the world's future.
        • So we can therefore determine that Dr. Manhatten is... Muad'dib.
        • Wouldn't he change the future by observing it? Isn't that what Heisenberg says? So he really doesn't know anything.
    • Um, okay, * in the universe of Watchmen* the history of Watchmen is the only real history. In our universe, Watchmen is just a fictional story written by Alan Moore. It's not * literally* an "alternate history" in any fictional "multiverse", unless you choose to imagine it as such. Not every "alternate history" story needs some kind of science-fiction framing device positing that the alternate universe "really exists" if you travel along the fifth dimension or some such nonsense.
  • When Manhattan says "there is no difference between life and death, they have the same amount of particles"? That is completely wrong. Live and dead bodies are very different, (decay, blood loss, microbiology, so many other fields in forensics can show this difference,) so it seems very stupid for him to claim "no difference between life and death." Any ideas for an explanation of this?
    • At a guess I think it's because Manhattan's (a) talking about a comparison between a living body and an immediately dead body ; and (b) looking with a closer microscope, down to constituent elements and the atoms that make them up. Remember, Manhattan views things through the lens of physics and atomic physics in particular; he's not a biologist. Since energy can't be created or destroyed, and the body's mass (subject to some new-age theories) doesn't appreciably change after death, Manhattan therefore concludes there's no difference in the area which matters, which is at the atomic or subatomic level.
    • 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.[1] Secondly, everything you just described is not comparable. That license plate? It's a part of a system which churns them out in sequence; it never had any possibility of being any number besides PX-13-AA. Manhattan's point was that despite him knowing how the universe works on every scientific level conceivable, he still does not understand just how random human life is. He looked at the odds behind Laurie being born, from the pure physical aspect of her conception to the fact that her mother slept with a man she had ever reason not to. That's more than a one-in-a-million chance, that's astronomical odds. As for his belief that there's no difference between a live body and a dead one, it's because he's looking at it from the most basic level possible. He doesn't view sentience as being important, so from his perspective yes there is no difference. He doesn't care about other people, and Silk Spectre even says he looks at the world like he's seeing it through a fog, so why would be care about people, dead or otherwise?
        • (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, 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.)
            • (MFT guy again) So yeah, it bugs me that he Did Not Do the Research.
              • Isn't the point of what Manhattan is saying is that everyone is a thermodynamic miracle, it just happens so often that nobody notices? Aren't you just proving his point?
              • Dr. Manhattan says this exact thing in almost these exact words; that literally everyone, not just Laurie, exists despite the odds being in the billions against their existence in the first place and the strong likelihood that someone else entirely could have existed in their place (that particular sperm manages to fertilize that particular egg instead of another; those two people happen to have sex at that particular time in a way that results in conception; those two people happen to meet in the first place; those two people happen to be be the products of particular sperm fertilizing particular eggs, and so on; looking at all of those things happening in order to create that particular person sends the odds into astronomical territory), but that it happens often enough that we we just can't really see it unless we stop and think about it. He just uses Laurie as an example because the circumstances of her birth are further complicated by other factors that make it even more unlikely (such as the fact that her mother has very strong and compelling reasons to hate her father yet somehow manages to fall in love with him anyway), and yet it happened anyway.
  • There seems to be a lively discussion as to WHY Dr Manhattan has an epiphany, however I consider it even more puzzling - HOW does he have it? An epiphany implies that he looks at things in a whole new way. But as he sees the future in its entirety (at least his own), he has always been aware of the particular things that led him to the epiphany. There is no way he can have a shift in perspective because everything that might lead to this shift is already known to him. Let's say that while he perceives all his existence timelessly, his actual thought processes are more linear and he just needs enough time to process what he knows (and what he knew all along, by his very nature) to reach the epiphany. Better? Not really, because even if he can only see into his future withOUT realising what he will eventually realise, he can still see the end result of his epiphany - which had a very real impact on his actions. Being able to see his future actions that make no sense from his current mindset he is bound to figure out why his mindset will change - therefore changing his mindset earlier. This is an extreme version of a common paradox in time travel stories, but more extreme. If a time traveler has to do something, he could just travel in time, skipping to the point where it has already been done. But while such a paradox can be worked around, Manhattan's perfect knowledge and timelessness means that he can skip to the moment where his thinking "work" is done without any obstacles. In other words, he doesn't have to reach an epiphany because he already knows his future where he has reached it. In fact, every idea Manhattan will ever have is already accessible to him. So how come we have a pre-epiphany Dr. Manhattan and a post-epiphany Dr. Manhattan? There is no way anything in his attitude could change if he can predict all the changes in his attitude. This implies at least one of the following:
    • He is wrong about time being meaningless to him and he is, in fact, bound by it in some way;
    • The future is not deterministic, he is wrong about it;
    • The future is not deterministic, he is lying about it - to others or to himself;
    • The future is deterministic, but something stops him from fully realising what will happen in his future (which contradicts what he says);
    • The future is deterministic up to the point where he has an epiphany, where it somehow shifts (but why? That seems quite random. Plus, it implies that Dr. Manhattan has the power to change the future if he only changes his mind - which makes the future non-deterministic in the first place, anyway...);
    • Plot hole (but I don't like this option to much, naturally);
    • The future is deterministic, but Dr. Manhattan's vision of it is imperfect. But this eliminates what seems to be the character's main problem - being bored due to having perfect knowledge about the future. Not understanding his own future self's motivations seems exciting enough.
  • Related to the above problem - at one point, Manhattan can't see the future due to tachyon technobabble, which makes him understandably excited. But BEFORE that he sees his entire future. Not being able to see it for a while doesn't change the fact that he already knows - he knew before - what will happen after this "blackout". Heck, Manhattan could see in advance the moment where he would not be able to see the future. The only way he could be "in the dark" would be if he purposefully did not look into his far future in order to avoid spoiling the surprise. But if he could do that, he could do that at ALL times. So the "tachyon" plot point is either meaningless or implies Dr. Manhattan is very inconsistent in his seeing the future. The way the story portrays it, it's like a man walking towards a tree twenty steps away. When he is ten steps away from it, he is suddenly blinded and excitedly exclaims "my! I can't see anything, I wonder if there are any trees in front of me!"


Would Masked Vigilantes Be Taken Seriously As Extranormal Heroes / Threats?

  • The police strike has never made sense to me, mainly because the rationale the picketers seemed to be using was that regular cops were being put out of work by annonymous vigilantes. However throughout Watchmen I can't recall any indication that there were more than a dozen or so superheroes active at any one time, and only one of them had superhuman abilities (and he was exempt from the superhero ban anyway). Given how realistic Moore was trying to be in Watchmen, I don't see how a handful of individuals could pose a legitimate threat to police job security. Sure, if you're going to survive as a superhero you've got to be more skilled than an average cop, but most police work doesn't require expert fighter/master detective/escape artist skills. The occasions where such skills are necessary are (a) not that common, and (b) tend to be so dangerous that most cops probably wish they could pass the buck on storming the mansion filled with heavily armed gangsters. I can certainly see why the police would protest the government's endorsement of vigilantism, but not for the reasons they gave in Watchmen.
    • Nah hints are dropped that there were others around the country. The ones you see are just the East Coast/NY minute men types. Presumably Chicago, LA, etc saw their own masked loonies running around. They just don't tie directly into the plot so they're not mentioned. Hooded Justice and the like are easy to miss from a quick reading since they're not part of the main Veidt plot, but they still existed in the back story.
    • You know what bugs me about the police strike? That it takes place during 1977, the year of the Great New York Blackout, and the Summer of Sam. How could the police be so irresponsible? Why would everyone rally around the cops like that? In the 70s people where very anti-police, mostly because of the still fresh memories of the civil rights movement, and the general public image of police as storm troopers eager to crack some hippie skulls. I very much doubt the police would receive any sympathy in 1977 of all years. Think about it, people in major cities don't generally have any sympathy for garbage workers when they strike, because it turns the city into an unsanitary landfill. Do you really think the average New Yorker would sympathize with "The Man's" problems, especially when there's a Serial killer on the loose, and a major blackout that leads to looting and riots? Come on Alan! You seem like the kind of guy who would know this kind of thing!
      • Wow! Put that way I can actually see it going the other way, with people going "fuck the cops, let's all take matters into our own hands! These superheroes seem to have everything figured out, let's all go be like them!"
      • It's entirely possible neither of these things are present in the Watchmen universe. Besides, people would be more tolerant of "The Man" since "The Man" won the Vietnam War handily, undercutting the major reason for the anti-government sentiments at that moment.
    • I think the strike was more about gratitude and credit. People idolized the masked vigilantes because they went out and enforced the law. Police were doing that for years, every day and no one gave them NEARLY as much gratitude and appreciation they gave the Comedian or Nite Owl. How would you like it if one day someone came off the street, VOLUNTEERED to do your job for one hour and got showered with praise while you were ignored. The ingratitude irked them.
      • Cops are never accepting of vigilantes, especially successful ones. It hits them where they live. And the fact that these "heroes" weren't even willing to show their real faces, dressed like clowns, and got all the public acclaim of war heroes just for stopping a liquor store robbery, and were even allowed by the government to continue to operate with no oversight... well, no wonder it made them mad.
      • I thought it was more to do with distrust of super-heroes. After all, if a guy's crazy enough to run around in tights and a mask, what else might he be crazy enough to do (See Rorschach and the Comedian)? Sure, they say they're watching over us, but who's keeping watch on them? Who watches the Watchmen?
      • Vimes.
      • The Boys. Well, they'd keep a close eye on Dr. Manhattan, anyway.
    • Could also be a case of the heroes doing more harm to communities and the rule of law than good, in the same way that Doctor Manhattan's amazing powers have only brought the world closer to armageddon.
    • I keep wondering why the Comedian is considered an "extranormal operative" along with Dr Manhattan. What exactly is it that he does that no normal mere mortals can do? His celebrity let him solve a hostage situation, once. But put him in a combat situation and he's just a big damn target. The same costume makes the idea of him performing covert assassinations ridiculous. I think it's a general problem in Watchmen that there are these people who work out and run around in colorful costumes and for that are considered more than human.
      • To quote Ozymandias, he's supposedly "the perfect fighting man"- factoring in the fact that he also once defeated an admittedly young and inexperienced Ozymandias (i.e.: the guy who beats up Rorschach and Nite-Owl simultaneously and catches bullets with his bare hands) in single combat, it's likely that he had some sort of Naked Snake style Charles Atlas Superpower thing going on. Plus, as you already pointed out, his "celebrity" is something of an advantage- if nothing else, having a guy going around fighting America's enemies dressed up in the flag must be something of a propaganda boost. As for the others- Silk Spectre hung around with Doc Manhattan, so didn't really need to be that effective herself, Nite-owl had ubertech, Ozymandias had a Charles Atlas Superpower thing along with being the smartest man on earth, and Rorschach... Rorschach was just plain crazy.
      • I assumed "extranormal operative" simply to mean "operative outside the normal chain of command."
        • "He split from the whole fuckin' program."
        • It's not like he has to wear the costume all the time, you know. I consider it fairly obvious that he has carried out covert assassinations undercover several times, as well as leading battles from the front in his Comedian identity.
    • 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 riots—something it would take literally dozens of police to shut down—Dan and the Comedian are handling an entire section of the city. Rorschach's holding a section on his own. Laurie and Jon are holding the entire city of Washington on their own (granted, it's easier with the Doc.) It's sort of like that old joke: "Where's the reinforcements?" "Commander, I am the reinforcements." These guys are capable well past human norms.

What Is Rorschach's Appeal?

  • What is Rorschach's appeal?
    • 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.
    • 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 long-haired bishounen) and beat the everloving shit out of him. His black-and-white morality is seductive in its simplicity: aku soku zan—slay evil immediately.
    • 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.
    • He drives the plot forward, kicks ass and gives hilarious (and disturbing) exposition.
    • Ditto to the above, with emphasis on 'drives the plot forward'. Rorscach is the only character in the whole damn book who gets off his hinder and does something. It's only natural that the audience gravitates to him as the 'hero'. The fact that Alan Moore may not have intedned this speaks more to Moore's ability to construct a narrative than the audience's interpretations.
    • He's The Woobie. More seriously, Rorschach plays the role of the classical Tragic Hero; he's a larger-than-life character who, despite good intentions, is eventually undone by his own flaws.
    • His is the only view that actually believes in a 'good' person that still tries to deal with 'bad' people. Most of the heroes totally gave up, Ozymandias is a moral relativist, and so that just leaves Rorscahch as the only one who's handling good and evil at all. It may not necessarily be the right way to handle it, but there is an appeal to knowing somewhere there's good (not that Rorscahch sees much of it) and the bad guys are getting the crap beaten out of them.
        • One of the main reasons I think so many people like rorschach, is because he takes action. He is out there, killing people, breaking fingers, scaring muggers. He does things. Nite Owl II waits until rorschach's in jail to do anything important, most of Veidt's action, and planning, is off-screen. Manhattan escapes to mars for the first part of the story. Silk Spectre II is against the whole thing. The Comedian is dead. Rorschach is one of the -if not the only- character/s that move the story forward actively for the first 2/3 of it. He's doing stuff, and looking badass the whole time. I'd have no problem sitting through 90 minutes of Rorschach. He's active. And he's active NOW, not ten years ago.
    • 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 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 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 him—even when he electrocutes the prisoner, the subtext and imagery are of a little child cowering away from a bully. This, again, is to invoke Think of the Children: as readers we inherently believe in "pick on someone your own size" as a catchcry from our childhoods, and the criminals in each case (Mr Fat Fryer, Mr Fat Hands, Mr Welder) are all presented as picking on a little kid. It's only when Rorschach's walking after Big Figure that he's presented as adult size again.
  • 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.

Alternative Morality - Rorschach Vs Ozymandias

  • How can someone actually see Rorschach's morality in positive light? While he is badass and has a freudian excuse for some of the stuff he does, he has went so far along the "he who fights monsters" line that he can no longer see the good people he should be protecting, just the evil people he thinks he should be smiting. I personally lost my last ounce of sympathy for him was when he told about brutally slaughtering two dogs for the sole reason that their owner had fed them a kidnapped girl. Like animals have the capacity to "choose the side of evil", as he puts it.
    • Then again, how can so many Watchmen fans actually see Veidt's motivations in a positive light? Especially when folks condemn Rorschach for his "cut and dry morality". Black and white morality is not by definition bad (logically speaking). What really disturbs me is folks who come out of books or films using them to justify real-life death and warfare, etc. (see Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) on the grounds "nothing is absolute", "just look at a guy like Veidt, he had to sacrifice people, he wasn't the villain, Rorschach was!" Which I think is not what the author intended.
      • That does not mean people are either "good" or "evil". They're not. But that does not reject the concept of absolutes. The protagonist and antagonist of Les Misérables, for instance, both believe in cut and dried morality; the antagonist simply falls flat in believing people are either-or.
      • Ozymandias is pretty far from being objectivist. His view seems to be that morality is an incredibly complex thing, made up almost entirely of conflict of things that would generally be deemed 'good'. He doesn't even seem to believe that good and evil exist objectively, but rather that they're defined by a mix of genetic imperatives and cultural memes.
        • 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.
    • This Troper will admit it's a matter of Misaimed Fandom—Rorschach's viewpoint is rather obviously demonstrated as being less-than-viable over the long term, so it's clear we're not supposed to think he's the good guy. I still like the character's morality; he sees evil, true and consistent evil, and actually does something about it. That's something that's far too rare in the real world. We watch other government's leaders kill millions, or sit a few dozen feet away from this week's Catherine Genovese, content in our knowledge that the government did it 'for the greater good' and that we are individually safe from the murderer. A character who can get past that with only a slight death wish and sexual abnormalities is impressive. Yes, he killed animals that had been trained and used by a child murderer as guard dogs. They were tools used and trained for undeniably evil purposes, and probably couldn't be retrained even if someone had the time and intent to do so. Yes, it's a recipe for leaping off the slippery slope, but we don't see him become a monster. He commits Suicide By Deity-Cop rather than let himself violate his rules or turn into a monster.
      • 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 barfly—in the seediest dive he knows of—fingers while trying to hunt down a murderer of another hero. He stuffs an ex-supervillain into a fridge in the same process. I don't see that as more evil than a man who killed millions on the off chance that it might save others from a death that might be coming.
        • 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.
      • While I wouldn't peg Rorschach as pure evil, I do agree that he in fact DID become a monster. The biggest evidence for this is at the end of the chapter where we finally see into the darkness that is Rorschach's psychology. Moore ends the issue with the Nietzsche quote "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." Despite room for interpretation, that quote is really hard to ignore. It could refer to Rorschach no longer being Walter Kovacs after his psyche broke by killing the child murderer, or the psychologist attempting to figure him out and slowly becoming sociopathic after staring into the "abyss" that is Rorschach's mind.
        • 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 Adam, but he's not Frankenstein. He's violent because he's screwed up, has a few stock Freudian Excuses, and has given up on Black and White Morality for Grey and Gray and Orange morality, whereas certain other characters have had pretty good lives, and well-developed moral senses, they just choose to ignore because it's more convenient in the short or long run. He's not a good role model, and probably True Neutral with Good motives and Evil tendencies, but he's far from the most evil character in the series whether you count the mob members, petty criminals, and prisoners or not.
    • 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.

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 thought—that heroism is defined by seeing bad things happen and * doing something about it* , regardless of what that "something" is, regardless of what effect that "something" has—was supposed to be a deconstruction of everything he found troubling about America's superhero fetish (which Steve Ditko turned into a full-blown Objectivism-inspired personal philosophy). See Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns for a fuller, more over-the-top enactment of this philosophy by someone who actually believes in it. For my part, I find that Moore did a good job of giving us a Rorschach, giving us the logical opposite of Rorschach (Ozymandias), making them both as heroic as they could be and still ending up as monstrous and worthy of fear and contempt, and thus leaving us with no easy answers about how to deal with the whole right-and-wrong thing.
    • 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.
  • I think I like Ozymandias more than I'm supposed to. It's not because of what he did-normally I dislike people who believe that Utopia Justifies the Means. But out of all the characters he seems to be the best and brightest. He's the only one who really believes that humans have the abililty to make a better world for themselves, if only they stop being stupid. Am I reading something wrong?
    • Well, Tropes Are Not Wrong, so... I think it's a case of the villain being the only competent/dedicated/stick-tuitive character, I know there's a trope name for that, where you have to admire him as a fictional character, even if he's a Complete Monster, because he's the only smart guy in the room. Like Keyser Soze. You can't do that in real life because in real life there's always a "somewhat good" person capable of putting up an argument against fanaticism.
    • Or even arguing that, if sacrificing millions to save billions is a good thing, then risking the lives of billions for the truth (Rorschach's argument) can't be dismissed either. (Would Russia have really initiated WWIII having just learned that an evil capitalist had initiated a false-flag operation against America? Or would the US have returned to Def-Con 4 2 after learning Veidt did it?)
    • But in real life the "practical, somewhat good" person will say "no, we don't want people to know the truth, but we don't want the guy who did it to get off scot free either." Ironically this is one shade of grey Alan Moore didn't explore. What if the "heroes" had "extraordinarily renditioned" Veidt? Not that they were able to, of course.
      • Ozymandias needs to go free because only he can lead the Free World to peace. He's got the means and the motive, and now the opportunity. If they were to bring it in, everything he worked for would fail.
      • Explain something for me...how the fuck would you go about punishing Veidt? He hammered Rorschach and Dan, and while Nite Owl had been out of action for a while, Rorschach is a vicious fighter who simply doesn't stop. Your only option is Dr. Manhattan, who may have a new interest in humanity, but that doesn't mean he's going to appoint himself head of the Karma Police.
        • Use a gun? (And if that don't work, use more gun.) Seriously, though, there's only so much even the "perfect" Ozymandias could do against that possibility...
      • The Karma Police would go after Dr. Manhattan first. He talks in maths and buzzes like a fridge. He's like a detuned radio!
      • This conversation just won the internet forever.
      • Getting back to the subject of punishing Ozymandias without dooming the world. This troper almost immediately thought a Jedi Truth could have resolved everything...in the comic at least. Simply say that Ozymandias transported the alien to New York with the unspoken implication that he was The Quisling for the alien invasion. What little the public might learn from Rorschach's journal might help corroberate that and Veidt might be put in a corner after that. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. will still be too afraid of the aliens to fight each other, but they "know" Veidt was responsible...just in a way that they don't realize he had more to do with it than they thought. Veidt will, of course, keep his lips zipped on that aspect of the plan, even when he's effectively checkmated.
        • It's still their word against an ultra-rich and powerful humanitarian/athlete/inventor who's immensely popular and widely regarded as saint-like. I'm pretty sure they'd lose that battle.
  • I dislike Ozymandias far more than I'm supposed to. One point that has yet to come up in this whole WMG is the fact that Ozymandias started the war he used to justify killing millions of people to stop. He sent Dr. Manhattan to the stars in order get him out of the way, upsetting the balance of power and starting the countdown to doomsday. I always saw him as a commentary on the mental gymnastics that people will do to believe the well-dressed erudite bishounen over the laconic hobo who tells them what they don't want to hear.
    • He didn't start a war, he just allowed the Cold War to escalate, and that was well under way by the end of the 1940s. It wasn't as if Reds with Rockets only became a serious concern when he showed up.

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 mind—especially since so much of his earlier existence seemed to be intricately bound to raging against death. (Rorschach has, at this point, been the unkillable man who refuses to give up against any odds whatsoever, and he rages against the idea of ever accepting death as a good thing in his speech about Anubis to Nite Owl.)
    • 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.
        • It's supposed to bug you. If all works of literature refused to "bug" the reader, literature would be a lot more boring.
        • 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 peace—in this world—because an alliance between the USA and USSR leads to a single hegemonic superpower with the ability to crush any pissant Third World troublemakers under their boot. The Third World troublemakers have only existed as long as they have because the two superpowers use them as pawns against each other—now that the superpowers, their strength all intact, are working * together* , and now that they have a terrible and overriding responsibility to protect the Earth from the next alien invasion by any means necessary, it seems like an all-powerful One-World Government is in the offing. And Ozymandias has stated rather unsubtly that he plans to maneuver himself into becoming its leader (putting aside Alexander to become Ramses).
          • 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.
            • Unchallenged?
            • Bear in mind that peace between the USA and USSR doesn't mean a single hegemonic leadership. Even if we assume that there are no more military disagreements between the two for the rest of Watchmen's future, there's still the minor detail of their two completely incompatible systems of economy and government. Joint operations would become mired in red tape, politicians in both countries below the federal level would likely become increasingly resentful and corrupt, dealing with Afghanistan would probably be harder as they have to come up with a strategy and roadmap that both ideologies can accept, and throughout all this it gets even easier for al-Qaeda or Nod as, with the spheres of influence unchecked, more and more people get annoyed about whatever it is drives people to join at the same time as having more rival territory to hide in. Oh, and the Soviet government would be a lot less likely to collapse in such a world, meaning this situation would go on even longer.
            • Terrorism could be a problem. Perhaps that's why Ozymandias's cartoon is going to feature him fighting terrorists? Clearly he has his sights set on that particular problem.
      • God I never noticed that...Oz is such a dick!
    • Rorschach's death was set up to have as little motivation as possible, it seems. In the conversation on Mars, Dr. Manhattan foresaw that he would kill someone, but "their identity is not known to me." The way he says it, he may not have even gotten a face or much of a set-up for the time he would kill someone. If the tachyons were messing with his foresight enough, he may have been mistaken about it being a vision, and when the opportunity to kill someone presented itself, he took the easy path to a self-fulfilling prophecy and killed someone whose face he didn't recognize.
      • Possibly what happened was: Dr. Manhattan meant he literally didn't know who he was killing. He had never seen Rorschach without the mask off and didn't recognize who exactly that was.
    • One thing that I keep wondering about Rorschach's death is the tears. Was he killed to help ensure the peace, or was it suicide by "cop"? Basically Rorschach couldn't compromise. It was just so far beyond him that to compromise would kill what made Rorschach's mask the true face. Was he egging Dr. Manhattan along to do what he felt was needed without compromising?
      • Something like that. Remember that Rorschach's motto was never to compromise, even in the face of armageddon. In this scene, he's basically realized the irony of the statement: while he originally meant it as in opposition to the end of the world, he now finds himself compelled to cause it. Even for Rorschach, that can't be fun to swallow. Remember also that the last time he cried was when Kovacs "died" years prior, when the last vestige of his humanity was crushed out when an incompetent criminal attempted to cover up his mistake by turning a child into dogfood. Rorschach's world is about to come down a second time, and death's preferable.
        • In a sense, it's the same quandry that broke the Comedian when he found out about the Squid Plot: the world can't afford for him to prevail under the circumstances, and apparently won't have a place for his hard-line morality in the era to come. The Comedian was one of Rorschach's heroes, and Kovacs' before him as well, so it's appropriate that they'd both break down under the same realization.
    • Surprisingly, that's exactly how I interpreted it (TV Tropers unite!). Rorschach came up against his line at the end - he knew that revealing the truth would plunge the world into war and chaos, and that that was evil, but to stop himself would mean sacrificing his code and identity as Rorschach. So he just "broke" and went on autopilot, heading back to civilization to tell everyone, but when the opportunity presented itself, he went for suicide-by-God. It was a huge Heroic BSOD, basically. That's just my view though.
    • And, for the love of god, why do people keep on deleting my WMGs and JB Ms? Anyway, I used to have a similar question pased asking why Rorshach, who views Kovacs as a mere mask, would show that face to Doc Manhattan? Why not die as Rorshach?
      • Perhaps he thought that that way, Rorschach doesn't die. Only Kovacs dies. He doesn't give this evil, scum-filled world the satisfaction of Rorschach (and with him, the whole Rorschachian moral system) being killed. If he'd died as Rorschach, it would mean admitting defeat, which would be too much like compromise. If the face was not on, the face did not die, and neither did the moral system.
        • Funny. I took the tears to heart and figured that with the revelation of Ozymandias' evil plan the Rorschach persona just breaks. The character finds himself up against a wall where his code does not operate anymore and is so dwarfed by the scale of events as to be irrelevant, and so he tears off his mask. And we see that under that facade Kovacs is crying. He's weeping for the death of millions, for the death of a morality that has guided him for almost two decades, and for his utter impotence in this situation. And so he takes command in the only way that remainds to him, and demands to die alongside his persona.
          • Exactly. A this moment he has become Kovacs again. He is human. Rorscarch knowingly accepts his fate, but underneath Kovacs is still a scared little boy who doesn't understand. While few feel sympathy for Rorscarch, Kovacs is sympathetic without being nauseating, and so his death is heartbreaking, even if the film version has a giggle-worthy pretty bloodstain. In fact, it's worse if you know what's going to happen...
          • Also note that he is wearing the exact same trenchcoat he wore when he turned from Kovacs to Rorscarch (it's still covered with the dog blood that he didn't bother washing), and for me, that reinforces the fact that right then, he reverted back into the human Kovacs from the "monster" Rorscarch.
    • As Alan Moore put it when speaking on the Comics Britannia series, Rorschach gained a "king sized death wish." He was in incredible psychological pain his entire life, but could not let himself die without honor. I feel this supports the Death by Cop interpretation. Doc Manhattan presented him with a way to die. There was no way he was going to survive the book, being that psychotic and uncompromising to the point where his life was destroyed. I find his death, and the removal of his mask especially, to be quite poignant actually.
    • Actually... I thought it was open-ended if Rorschach died or not. Just a few pages later, Doc says something like "I doubt he'll find his way back to civilization." So either yeah, Rorschach was killed, or Doctor Manhattan just teleported him somewhere remote.
      • It's called a euphemism. The whole scene falls apart if Rorschach doesn't die.
        • It's also a subtle punishment of Veidt. Ozymandias obssesses on small details. Manhattan is fucking with his head a bit to suggest there's even a possibility that Rorschach is still alive.
  • I read somewhere that the reason Rorschach is crying when he unmasks himself is because he has realised about his hypocrisy. He was in favour of President Truman's order to use the atomic bomb, reasoning that it was better than having to invade Japan, which would have been much more costlier in lives, both in the Japanese and the American side. And now, he has realised that Ozymandias' plan is exactly the same (killing relatively few people to save many, many others), and he finds himself in the quandary that his morals want him to tell everyone, yet his personal beliefs want him to stay quiet. Probably he was crying because he realised that Manhattan, by killing him, would stop him from having to go against his morals or his personal beliefs.
    • Why do people keep trying to compare the dropping of the atomic bombs to what Veidt did? The atomic bombs were acts of declared war, against a power that not only had vowed that they'd kill all of our POWs if we landed an invasion force on their soil, but had also demonstrated they were willing to murder their own population rather than letting them "suffer" under American occupation. The atomic bombs were an attempt to end a war directly, openly, and honestly, and the Japanese were even warned about it. Veidt's plan was mass murder based on deception, manipulation, against a population he was not at declared war with, based on nothing but his own sense of superiority and subjective morals.

Why Did They Let Him Live? (Spoilers)

  • Why did they all let Ozymandias live? I can understand why they didn't tell anyone that Ozymandias was behind the destruction of New York. But they're vigilantes. They kill outside the law based on their own moral code. How could they justify leaving him alive? It might be that I don't find the murder of innocents acceptable under any circumstances (not even to prevent a nuclear holocaust), but I would have killed Ozymandias and left his body to rot in the Antarctic.
    • Would it have saved anyone? Would it have brought back the dead? Nope. It's implied that Ozymandias has sentenced himself to his own punishment, a purely philosophical and spiritual damnation as suggested by his discussion of dreams and his last-minute doubt as to whether what he did was the right thing. For the Implacable Man/Determinator that he is, that's the worst punishment of all: being wrong.
    • Because the plan isn't over yet. Ozymandias still needs to sit behind the scenes and manipulate the chaos in the wake of the war into a strong, noble one-world government. Killing the puppetmaster before the puppet show is over might just ensure that the New York attack hastens rather than delays the end of the world.
    • How? I had this thought some time ago and it really annoyed me, until I realized that they might not be able to. Even assuming that Dan and Laurie could talk themselves into going along with a cold-blooded murder, I don't think that it's possible. Neither Rorschach nor Nite Owl could lay a hand on Ozy, and he's proved that bullets aren't necessarily effective. Doctor Manhattan is the only one of the group who could pose any sort of threat, and he more or less agrees with Veidt's actions.
      • He may not agree, but he's willing to go along with a done deal.
    • Plus, as alluded to above, Rorshach is the only killer among them. Even Manhattan only kills people by accident, or in the defense of The Masquerade, and Dan and Laurie never do anything deadly we hear about.
      • Then there's the question of "Would we really want them to?" Yes, it would be satisfying for the audience to see, but what good would it do beyond vengeance? Would it change anything for the better? It would be very out of character for Dan especially. And then add in the fact that they couldn't kill him, and you have your ending. Also, keep in mind that this is a deconstruction of previous comic tropes. Beforehand, heroes would always stop the villain from destroying the world. Watchmen takes on something more complex than "kill the bad guy and win" morality. In this story, the heroes/villains are trying to stop a hero/villain from saving it. The conclusion is that the characters realize this and choose to fail.
    • Theres a simpler reason. Ozymandias himself said it. "Will you kill me, risking further investigation?" He is a visible public figure, and if he were to vanish or die, people would immediately investigate the reasons as to why or how, which could cause the success to unravel anyways.
    • It should also be noted that Laurie does try and kill Adrian. He catches the bullet. There's nothing to suggest that Dan or Rorschach would do any better, and Manhattan doesn't care enough.
      • Also, Dan and Rorshach tried to whack Adrian before Laurie and Jon (Dr. Manhattan) showed up. They got their asses kicked.
        • And handed to them with a silver platter.
          • In my copy, the plate is gold.
      • While Adrian did catch that bullet, it wasn't a piece of cake to him. If they rapidly shoot at him several times, I doubt he can catch every single bullet. And even if the gun had only one bullet in it, they could try later, with machine guns and bombs to be sure. Not that they had the will to, as pointed out below.
    • Even if they didn't kill him, they could still have done something to ensure he doesn't get to rest on his laurels. Merely revealing that Veidt was the one behind the novel's fake extradimensional research program could have sufficed, without ruining his hoax, as he would've surely shouldered the blame for accidentally exposing New York to an alien squid-monster, rather than let the whole truth get out.
      • At the end of the graphic novel, Laurie and Dan set out on a career as vigilantes, playing cruel tricks on Adrian for the rest of their lives. He opens a door, and WHAM! bucket of owl pellets on his head. Dan reprograms Adrian's stuffed Bubastis dolls to say "YOU KILLED ME, ADRIAN" whenever the strings are pulled. Whenever he gets food from a Gunga Dinner, they've spat in it and he's the smartest man in the world so HE FUCKING KNOWS IT'S THERE but he can't do anything because he's in a business meeting and he's got play it cool.
        • In the end, he winds up in the padded cell next to Mothman after one string pull too many.
        • But of course he's anticipated all of that and one day will teleport a giant cream pie over the town they're staying in.
    • 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.
  • The other issue with killing Veidt is practicality—because Manhattan has been persuaded to Veidt's point of view. That being so, Dan, Laurie and Rorschach wouldn't be trying to kill Veidt alone. They'd be trying to kill a man now protected by a quantum-physics being that can turn guns to glass or outright disassemble people with a handwave, and who is now committed to preserving Veidt's life for the greater good. Manhattan is now Veidt's dragon.

Why did it have to happen to Rorscharch... (Spoilers)

  • Why did Dr. Manhattan bother killing Rorscharch? The obvious answer is that he wants to prevent Veidt's secret getting out (preventing nuclear war), but that doesn't fit well with the next scene. Manhattan heavily implies that a war will occur anyway, and considering all what he had said earlier about "time being relative", this troper couldn't imagine him killing Rorscharch just to try and give mankind a few more months. After all, if he really wanted to give mankind as much time as possible, he probably should have done more to secure our future, rather then just blow up one vigilante and then leave Earth forever.
    • His statement isn't necessarily an implication that the war will occur. Only that things are by no means over. A war might yet be started or it might not. Perhaps Ozymandias will be exposed, but the peace he built will survive him. Or perhaps everything will turn into Crystal Spires and Togas yet. The point is, the issue is far from settled.
      • I always took that scene to indicate that Manhattan was subtly punishing Adrian. What could be worse for Ozy than to hear God (someone who can see the future) tell him that the future he's been working for is ambiguous at best. To deny the smartest man in the world the certainty of knowledge is the most fitting punishment imaginable. Seriously, imagine trying to steer the course of human history. And then you ask someone who can see the future if your doing the right thing, and he just shrugs and walks away. Horrible.
    • Doctor Manhattan didn't need to kill Rorschach. One vigilante (even a very persistent one) with a bunch of crazy journal ramblings isn't going to make a difference. He didn't need to kill him, but there was no real reason to let him live either. Doctor Manhattan doesn't care one way or the other whether Rorschach survives, and the guy was asking him to do it.
    • Rorschach was in the middle of a complete mental breakdown (a breakdown of his already shattered mind), it could easily be a mercy kill for someone who's tearing themselves up inside from being utterly unable to accept to what just happened. Alan himself said he felt Rorschach was in emotional pain and had a king sized deathwish the entire comic.
      • Indeed Rorschach's proposition that he intended to make his way back to the Owlship and then somehow repair it and fly back to America suggested a deathwish all on its' own. He's in the Antarctic. Manhattan killing him then and there at the very least avoided the likelihood of a slow, agonising death from hypothermia.
  • Short answer to all of the above: because Rorschach asked Manhattan to do it. Manhattan might have a renewed interest in human life, but he's still fundamentally detached from humanity. A live body and a dead body have the same number of particles ... albeit in a lot of different places.

If He's The Smartest Man On Earth, Why Didn't He Just... (Spoilers)

  • On the subject of Ozymandias: Veidt is described as being smart enough to see the confrontation between the USA and the USSR coming. To avert nuclear devastation, he embarks on his Gambit Roulette to kill half of New York to force the superpowers together. Why, if he is so rich, smart and charismatic, does he not see any alternative? I mean, the most obvious alternative is to run for president, and then work together with Dr. Manhattan (who is now his subordinate) to defuse world tension?
    • Why would he want to be president (or any other head of state)? They have annoying things like union strikes, elections and Cabinets to deal with. This way, he gets to keep his fame which he very much enjoys (the action figures), gets all the power and none of the hassle.
    • Working within the system would take longer and involve a lot of unpredictable random factors, mainly those involving human beings. And the established political interests would not want to lose control of their pet Superman and would fight very hard and very dirty to retain that control. It would also run the risk that said entrenched interests would panic when they felt their control endangered, and do something stupid that given unstable world situation, could trigger the very nuclear conflict Veidt wanted to prevent.
      • I think, given the almost superhuman power as a businessman and public relations expert Veidt is given in the book, that your obstacles wouldn't be insurmountable by Veidt. Then again, he could still try to work within the system and keep his 'alien invasion' plan as a backup. What bugs me is that someone of his assumed intellect doesn't even consider the alternatives, but goes straight for the mass murder plot as the only alternative.
        • Both the "alien invasion" plan and the "work within the system" plan take a very long time and use a lot of resources. He can only do one, so he does the one he figures is more likely to succeed.
        • 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 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 morality—men who have appointed themselves the arbiters of life and death for the "greater good" of others--directly parallels that of the government itself. When Nixon is shown sitting in a briefing room discussing how many millions of Americans are "acceptable" to lose in a nuclear war, he's on the same morally questionable ground as Rorschach, which is very much the sort of point Moore likes to make about governments and authority figures.
      • 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 Adams—he's the smartest man on Earth. Who are you to tell him that his logic is flawed? He says "this is the best way", how are you going to disprove that?
      • That is quite possibly the silliest thing Scott Adams ever said. And the competition is stiff. Smart, even—smarter than everyone else—does not equal "infallible." If the world's smartest man would care to share his data and reasoning with, say, the world's ten next smartest people, it is quite possible they would find the former to be incomplete or the latter to be flawed. And by flawed I mean the batshit crazy result of a warped savior complex the size of Jupiter, but that last bit's just character interpretation. NB: You cannot disagree with me on this, my IQ is higher than Scott Adams'. I am therefore inarguably correct. And remember, all tropers and Cretans are liars.
        • 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.
      • Decision calculus. It's safe to assume that there were other options available to him; I can't imagine there could only be one single way to bring about potential world peace. But he assigns a value, say, to how many lives would be lost, the odds of his idea working, the potential number of factors that he can't predict, the probability of being caught, the length of the peace created, et cetera. Eventually he figures out that there is, objectively, a way to save the world with the smallest possible price. He's basically doing the moral equivalent of clipping coupons.
  • If he's the smartest man in the world, then why didn't he just leave well enough alone? He came up with this plan to prevent WW 3, but it became a self fulfilling prophesy because he's the one who drove Manhattan away, leading to the start of WW 3. Why not just wait it out? Wait until Manhattan takes off on his own accord (if he even does) and then start your plan?
    • 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 help—it was Manhattan's existence that provided (limited) protection from the Soviet nukes—and even that wasn't a shield since it just prompted the Soviets to increase their nuclear stockpile. More to the point, the President also does not have the power to force change through (as we've been seeing recently) no matter how hard he campaigns on it or wants the change to happen. And most importantly, being President doesn't control Russia's actions—it only controls the United States. Veidt also wasn't going to go to war to stop nuclear annihilation, either; he had logic and Alexander the Great's failed examples to show him that. No, he could only enact a scheme that would convince both nuclear powers at once to stop fighting and cooperate—something he could not do as the 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?
    • Dr.Manhatten would have answered 'yes'. Veidt's plan succeeded because the signal caused by his tachyons was indistinguishable from nuclear annihilation, and indeed Dr Manhatten described it as such to Laurie.
      • That would require depending on Dr Manhattan's answer. While he presumably does know the answer, whether he'd actually reveal it is another story. I suspect trying to use Manhattan to scry the future would prove a most frustrating oracle.

If He's So Powerful, Why Didn't Manhattan Just...

  • Off Side 7: I know this is a relatively shallow question, but a lot of the deeper stuff has already been touched upon. Why didn't Janie just ask Doc Manhattan to fix her wrinkles, if she was upset that her visibly aging was turning him off? And why is he so distant from human issues in some ways, but completely shallow in others (i.e. preferring younger women)?
    • For the first question, because he might say yes. Remember how Janie reacted when Jon offered her a drink? If you recall, that's pretty much everyone's reaction to Jon whenever he uses his powers. As for why Jon's still got human frailties, I think Moore intends to show that giving men access to the powers of a god doesn't make them better. Jon's new mindset limits him, but his personality, such as it is, is still just a jumped-up version of what it was in the first place. The watchmaker metaphor is something of a fatalistic one. One of the mysteries of the book is how much of Manhattan's fatalism was because everything he foresaw was inevitable, and how much of it was because he always viewed his life as being manipulated by outside forces like his father. At the end of the book, he's proactive for arguably the first time in his life.
    • I see what you're saying about the second issue (though it still seems a bit arbitrary to me)... As for the former, I'd say if there was some evidence that Janie was looking for an excuse to end the relationship, she might have refused to ask on those grounds... But otherwise, the minor discomfort with him using his powers should have been worth it. ...Maybe there were hints. I should go reread it...
      • I don't think it's about what would be minor physical discomfort, but the psychological weirdness of it. Drinking spontaneously generated water, while unsettling, is something you can get over. Having a walking H-bomb reshape your face (even superficially) is another matter altogether. As for the second question, since Jon himself doesn't age, human women to him probably age very quickly compared to say, atomic gold. Also, he perceives time oddly, so he can see younger and older versions of Janey concurrently, making her gradual aging over the years appear quite dramatic.
    • It's possible that Dr. Manhattan can't do that kind of fine manipulation of large numbers of atoms. Creating big, uniform vats of chemicals is one thing; doing repair work on human cells without damaging them is another. Or maybe Janie didn't believe Jon could do that, and didn't want to risk having him try and fail.
    • I think the Janey issue is not Dr. Manhattan's excuse to leave her but a reflection on her resenting him for staying young while she gets older. If you notice she was upset by his God like powers and he had to reasure her and she turned out a very bitter elderly woman in the future even after 20 years had passed. I think it was more about she not feeling okay with her aging (and thus growing bitter) and human nature and Silk Spectre II smiling at him was kind of confirmation of her fears thus causing the split. I think if Dr had only been atracted to SS over her young age he would had replaced Laurie for the next new 16 years old a long time before we meet them or had dumped Janey even before (When I first started the GN I though that Dr. Manhattan was a skirt chaser replacing young girlfriends every once in a while, wich is the pattern for guys that prefer younger women it was very interesting to know that he had been 11 years with Janey and 20 with Laurie). No to mention that the Dr. M may just know that Janey wouldn't be pivotal to his next step on the future. I mean if Jon would had been with Janey instead of Laurie during the events of the GN/movie I think he wouldn't had reached the conclusions about life that he did so he just pursued Laurie because he was supposed to do so and had nothing to do with Janey getting older, per se.
  • I always wondered if he could cure Janey or Wally's cancer. (And Dr M's relationship with Laurie is one of the points of the book I struggle with. I don't know what he sees in her - obviously there can be no intellectual connection with humans for Dr. M, even Adrian the genius is just an ant to him. He wants her physically, but by '85, she's in her mid-thirties, so one would presume he'd be tiring of her like he did with Janey. But apparently not.

It also annoys me when he says he left earth because she left him, when actually, all he did was go on television. He left earth when he found out Janey had cancer.)

    • Manhattan's abilities seem to be focused towards particle physics rather than biology (see the earlier discussion on his mistaken belief that there's no difference between a living body and a dead one). The accident gave him certain abilities, but superintelligence wasn't one of them, and he's a physicist by training, not a medical doctor. Earth of 1985 really had very little idea how to treat or cure cancer effectively, so there's little reason to think Doc could do so either (other than, perhaps, radiation therapy...)
  • If Dr Manhattan was so all powerful, couldn't he simply have disappeared ALL nuclear bombs unilaterally? I get that he might not care, but surely it would be less work to get rid of them once and for all then to constantly have the government pestering him. And I was annoyed at that picture of him blowing up the tank when he could have just turned it into water, or plough shares. I suppose the publicity boys told him that would be most effective. His uselessness in really making an end to wars bugged me.
    • 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 is—why didn't they tell him to make Russia disappear? Or at least threaten to?
    • 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?
      • Because he's almost omnipotent, except in the face of something as big as having tens of thousands of ballistic missiles flying through the air and trying to stop them all in less than half an hour. All Manhattan has to do is miss, oh, twenty warheads that got off the ground, and there's death on a massive scale. Hence the Cold-but-heating-up-rapidly War. He's not God in the Judeo-Christian sense. He has limits. But those limits are so high that it's difficult to imagine him being unable to do anything, given his combination of Flying Brick, matter manipulation, teleportation, and "be in many places at once" powers.
    • My interpretation of why Manhatten doesn't do anything really proactive is because of his ability to percieve every moment of his life at once. He is essentially experienceing everything he ever will at the same time, and therefore for all his power can do nothing about anything. Take, for example, the woman in Vietnam that the Comedian kills. While Manhatten could have done a number of things to prevent it, to him it already happened. At the same moment he sees the woman enter the bar he is seeing the Comedian berating him for not stopping him from shooting her. This is why he thanks Veidt for creating the tachyon burst at the end. Since he has no foreknowledge of what happens then, it is the first time since his transformation that he can truly act.
  • Actually, to respond to that "Dr. Manhattan left earth cause Laurie left him", I'm fairly sure he said that because at that point there was nothing left for him on earth to care for, nor was there a reason for him to stay. It's pretty much a Domino Effect. Manhattan is beginning to get captured up in his god complex which Laurie despises and leaves him for since she knows what will happen eventually. Shortly thereafter John goes through a state of questioning aspects of humanity and life, right before the interview he was sceduled to appear on, and by that point he realizes that mankind sees himself as nothing more of a freak of nature god who spreads cancer. It's during the interview that John cracks and it becomes all clear to him because if Laurie would still be with him during that point, he'd see how there is still value in human nature as individuals. But if even Laurie, who he loved and she loved back, can see what has become of him, he sees that mankind just isn't ready for a living god. Thus he leaves earth and stops caring for the world since the world has stopped caring for him.
  • ...make more Dr. Manhattans (not clones, just other superhumans)? Mostly out of idle curiosity, but it'd be one way to not be bored; have lots of people on the same scale as him, and play chess with the Muggles or something.
    • Other than "He can't", "He just doesn't want to", or "He foresaw himself not doing that", the main argument I can think of for 'against' is "He doesn't want to make more of himself" possibly out of fear.
    • It'd certainly give the story a more Transhumanist bent, and be another philosophy for the author to pick apart.
      • More likely "he can't". It's mentioned somewhere that they've been trying to replicate the circumstances that created Manhattan more or less since he first emerged, without success. Presumably those attempts have been made with Manhattan helping them.
  • ...create a portable tachyon generator? It's pretty clear that he loved the time when he was in Ozymandias' lair and he didn't instantaneously know the future. So why not duplicate the generator, miniaturize it and carry it around with him?
    • Because he's just discovered some fun thing to do that requires his full supernatural capacity - creating life.
  • Why did he choose the American side in military conflicts? The Americans don't have the power to force him, so why didn't he just continue doing science and trying to improve the world, and not go to Vietnam, or force Russia to build up a ridiculous nuclear arsenal to defend against him. Simply by saying "I will defend the side which is declared war against, and prevent crimes against humanity", there wouldn't be any sort of cold war. Or, avoiding the answer "because he didn't think of that", why didn't he do whatever he thought best? Why did he act like a passive government toy? There's just no way he'd be the one person on the planet who doesn't want to Take Over the World, For Great Justice or For the Evulz.
    • Fridge Brilliance: Manhattan is utterly a creature of physics. Newton's First Law of Motion is that a body will continue to do what it was doing unless acted on by an outside force. Before he died, Manhattan was an American. Ergo he would continue to do what he was doing. This is Manhattan's personality! Also, it's more or less explicit that Osterman's personality before the accident was pretty weak: he tends to have his decisions made for him by others.
  • Just a small thing, but why is Doctor Manhattan's signature killing move to make people explode? He can control atoms! Isn't there a neater way?
    • Probably, but a key part of Manhattan's personality is that he's utterly detached. Why not make them explode? That's the most efficient way to kill them, and he doesn't care about the mess. In one piece or a million, they're still dead. To him, what's the difference beyond what mortals think?


All Those "Darker And Edgier" Imitations

  • The fact that everything Alan Moore has written since has basically been an apology for Watchmen. The fact that he was surprised that Rorschach, the most interesting character in comics up to that point, proved to be popular, basically the whole attitude he has about Watchmen, the way he seems to hate it despite the fact that it's by far his best work. That bugs me to no end.
    • Moore has never apologised for Watchmen exactly - quite the contrary, he has often expressed pride in his and Dave Gibbons' achievements in the book. What he has expressed regret over is the fact that many comic book writers who came after him were inspired not by the storytelling techniques, characterisation and literary depth that he brought to the superhero genre, but rather by such surface qualities as the violence and the perceived "gritty, seedy, dystopian" attitude. Likewise, he has only expressed regret that Rorschach is popular for being a violent character, not for being an interesting and complex one. In short, Alan Moore is not sorry for Watchmen, only for the negative influence that "Watchmen" has had in some areas of comics writing.
    • 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 it—even Rob Liefeld admits it was mostly stupid BS.
      • 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 itself—it's more his frustration that the success of Watchmen kind of led to a trend of comics that were equally as superficial and shallow as the worst of comics before Watchmen, but instead celebrated a kind of nastiness disguised as being more 'adult' and used his work to justify it; his exact words at one point were that there was "an awful lot of the comics field devoted to these grim, pessimistic, nasty, violent stories which kind of use Watchmen to validate what are, in effect, often just some very nasty stories that don't have a lot to recommend them."
    • 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.
    • Alan has expressed bemusement that the angry period he was having at the start of the eighties got inflated into the new paradigm of comics. He didn't apologise for it, because it's not his to apologise for, he just went on doing his own thing.
    • Basically, after Watchmen came along, a huge portion of the comic book industry devoted itself to 'deconstructing' the superhero genre through a lot of gratuitous violence. Whether you like the Dark Age or not, it was missing the point. As gritty ultra-violence and malevolence became the norm for supeheroes, the best way to deconstruct comics again would be to go for something Lighter and Softer. Hence, the stuff which seems like an 'apology' from Moore is really just more of the same, with different pants on. I think the real source of disappointment here is that he hasn't made anything quite like Watchmen again since - but really, it's lightning in a bottle. You very often can't do something like Watchmen twice.
    • Put yourself in Moore's shoes. How would you feel if everyone told you that book you wrote 25 years ago was your best work, even though you've been putting other books in the years since? Most people I know believe thier skills improve with age, and I'm sure Moore prefers his recent efforts to some of his first.
      • Maybe I'd try and, I don't know, make something original instead of doing adaptations of other peoples' work, and then getting mad when other people adapted my adaptations. But that's just me. (In other words, I don't feel his skills have improved with age, and he's just being petty. Watchmen was, after all, born out of his petty desire to destroy the characters of people he didn't particularly like and DC telling him that he couldn't, so he instead filed the serial numbers off.)

Adrian Veidt's Peccadillos (Book/Film)

  • Why does Adrian Veidt ever embark upon a career as a costumed vigilante? It seems uncharacteristically naive that a man of Veidt's intelligence and erudition - especially one who idolizes an ancient military and world leader such as Alexander the Great - should ever consider crimebusting on such a relatively small scale as being worth his efforts. I can accept the Comedian having a better grasp of the human condition than Veidt, certainly, but not the global political situation and where it was heading.
    • Because inspite of what he did, back then, he was still an idealist and genuinely believed he can make a huge difference being a costumed crimefighter. Look at how he carried himself during the flashbacks. He only retired and went into his cynical persona once the Comedian put some perspective into him with his speech in one of their last meetings.
    • Because, as he admits himself, he was still young and somewhat naive. Remember his background; Adrian Veidt grew up as a pampered rich kid.
      • Yes, but he takes up his vigilante career after he gave away his entire inheritance and spent considerable time travelling around the world following Alexander the Great's footsteps, living in poverty and studying martial arts. These worldly experiences should have disavowed him of his "pampered rich kid" upbringing. And it still seems unlikely that man as keenly intelligent, observant and detached as Veidt was ever naive enough to think that the world's - or even one city's - problems could be solved by masked adventuring, as he claims in Chapter XI (he genuinely believed that crime was the sole province of criminals?).
      • For a workout? For fun? Most likely, to establish himself as a household name and build his unassailable PR fortress on the hero image. And just because fighting petty criminals won't save the world doesn't mean he isn't improving a small part of it by doing so. Probably all four.
      • Don't forget that, for all of Veidt's intelligence and logic, he completely and utterly in love with himself. A part of that is proving dominance through violence. He picked a fight with the Comedian in his youth, just to see what would happen, and when we see Veidt holding him over his head ready to throw him out the window, he is clearly loving it. Veidt was better at everything than everyone, and liked to prove it. Being a "mystery man" was a good way to prove his mental and physical superiority on a regular basis, and be hailed a hero for it.
      • Going by some of the hints of Intelligence Equals Isolation in the movie, it could be he was trying to look for people he might finally be able to relate to.
    • Egomania. Veidt worships himself and wanted to have action figures of himself under millions of Christmas trees so that small children would worship him as well. They don't make action figures of CEOs. (Well, they do now thanks to "irony", but that was a few decades off when Watchmen was written.)
  • This toper only saw the movie so he can't be sure if it was there in other versions, but what the hell was that horned tiger Ozymandias had as a pet?
    • That is Bubastis, named for the Egyptian city of the same name, which the center of worship for the feline goddess Bast. It's a mutanted lynx that Ozymandias made. And yes, Bubastis is in the graphic novel.
      • In fact, it seems a lot less out of place in the graphic novel and ends up being a Chekovs Gun, since Ozymandias' ability to genetically engineer alien-looking lifeforms is central to his plan. This troper did think that Bubastis seemed random in the movie and wouldn't have made sense if you hadn't read the graphic novel.
    • I haven't seen the movie yet, but I figured since there's no "squid", Bubastis would just be another symbol of Veidt wanting to play god.
  • Megan Phntm Grl would just like to comment that the name of this section pleases her immensely and will be duly recorded on Veidt's Sueniverse Wiki page.
  • Re. the movies-only "Boys" folder, or at least I'm fairly sure that was film-only: The smartest man in the world can't hide his porn better?
    • Hey, now, there are many perfectly legitimate things that could be kept in a folder called "boys". For instance, plans for an army of Ozymandias look-alikes to carry on the legacy. Or something.
    • I mean, I know, but everyone jumps to the conclusion that it's porn. Personally, Movie!Ozymandias would more likely hide his personal viewing material in a folder marked, I don't know, Plans For Brain-Blasting Giant Attack Squid. Something. (This troper does have a WMG that they're many, many family photos of his hundreds of illegitimate children.) It could be related to the action figures thing, or an army of mini-Veidts. But if it's not, well, gosh.
    • Why BOTHER hiding it? It is his own personal machine. No one else was supposed to use it and its not like he needs to feel ashamed of it. I don't bother hiding my porno, why should he?
      • It's not hidden at all. The entire computer set up was to get Rorschach et al to his arctic base to explain his plans to them. The folder is probably empty.
        • Just because the computer was left accessible to Rorschach and Nite Owl doesn't mean it wasn't also his personal computer. It is sitting at the desk he spends hours behind every day, I doubt he went out and bought a fresh one just to stick it there for the plan. Or if he did, he still had to spend hours at it anyway, so he browsed porn at it, since his sexuality wouldn't matter one way or the other to the plan.
  • The worst bit of Fridge Logic for me - there's no possible way Adrian Veidt hasn't read "Ozymandias". It's about the hubris of proclaiming yourself the best and greatest in the world - a memento mori to the human race. So either Ade didn't get that, or he's so fantastically meta-arrogant that he considers himself above the rule of irony itself...
    • I think Ozy totally gets that. He named himself Ozymandius so that he doesn't forget that. Look through the comic, and he never proclaims himself the best and greatest in the world - it's others that do.
    • He says he wanted to reclaim the name Ozymandias. The real Ozymandias was Adrian's hero, and he didn't like the fact that the great pharoah's name was now remembered only for a poem about failure. He wanted people to associate the name with success and heroism.

Black And Grey Morality

  • The fact that one of the three characters I found vaguely comprehensible from a moral standpoint (Rorschach, Doc Manhattan, and Silk Spectre II for reference) ended up dead, and another had a Face Heel Turn. This book is not black and gray morality or even grey and gray, it's purple and green and hell why not yellow morality. IMHO, and don't tell me I'm missing the point, Rorschach wasn't the one who dealt with monsters and became a monster, Ozy was. Ozy, and everyone who went along with him.
    • Then go ahead and call me a monster too.
      • 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 is—Manhattan only regards human life as less than meaningless because of the "thermodynamic miracle" that led to Laurie's existence nonetheless despite all the odds against it happening. But even this, too, is Dr. Manhattan imposing some form of meaning on otherwise random events—just an optimist's spin on it instead. That's what Moore was doing: telling us, "This is a set of events that can be regarded as evil or good, but it is up to [i]you[/i] to determine which and assign meaning to it." Indeed, even Dr. Manhattan's newfound reverence for human life in the wake of perceiving the "thermodynamic miracle" is subverted: in order to revere human life and prevent further death and destruction, he, too, must say nothing and go along with Ozymandias's plan.
      • 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.)
      • Moreover, whether he averted Armageddon or not, the fact is that revealing what he did may well start it. Doctor Manhattan is already gone, so the USA is no longer the ultrapower of the world; the USSR, if the fancy took them, could very easily destroy us. Mutually assured destruction is not only possible, it's probable. What you're basically saying is that it is more right to kill billions in the name of justice than to let one man live in the name of injustice.
      • So? The thought process of which you speak is a very real moral code. "Fiat iustitia et pereat mundus". Let justice be done, even if it destroys the world.
      • That's... um, 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"—it's a Jack Bauer mentality. "The real bad guys want to destroy us for our freedoms, so revealing the truth would put our brave men and women in danger" or some-such.
          • The leaders of the USSR were in fact Complete Monsters (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? 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 is—Rorschach is obsessed thinking about the legacy of his little masked-costumed-adventurer fraternity while the world is about to die in fire.
        • 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 fail—the worst thing you can do to an extremist is give him responsibility for actually running a country. In the Watchmen universe the USSR wasn't able to do a single damn thing outside its nuclear sphere of influence without American power blowing it to shreds in its face—that's a recipe for creating a deeply pissed-off and xenophobic population that is very, very deeply attached to said nuclear sphere of influence.
        • 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.
      • Rorschach took that path and he died for it. Principles intact, but he's still dead. Look, what Ozy and the others did wasn't right. I'm not saying it was, not at all, but I am saying that it's understandable that those characters would allow it, and I'm also saying that it's not exactly right to bring him in, either. (There's a variety of reasons, one being in the era Watchmen was written everybody did not expect the Soviet Union to collapse and lived in a state of constant paranoia which is hard to grasp today, another being that I would be astonished if Ozy allowed them to bring him in.) Moore's point (and mine) is that there aren't as many right choices in a situation like that as many comic books would have us believe (i.e. possibly none), which he spends every one of his pages setting up and explaining. It sure would be nice if there was, but Watchmen isn't about nice, which the scenario you described would completely undermine, rendering the book's tone deeply schizophrenic.
      • Really? IMO, the dark tone would make it all the more inspiring and frankly enjoyable. Like walking through a city on a dreary day and then noticing a flower poking from the sidewalk.
      • 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. Manhattan—be it technology or ideology—that this is the best of all possible worlds—an ancient fallacy that can be used to justify anything. This troper's understanding of Watchmen is that Alan Moore wanted to show a cautionary tale of flawed characters who should not be emulated.
      • 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.

Sympathy For The Comedian

  • What Just Bugs Me is the fact that I seem to be the only person who's "Watchmen character I identify with" is the Comedian. Morally reprehensible, certainly, but Blake has the one and only aspect of any character in the series I recognized in myself: his understanding that most of modern society is just a colossal joke who's punchline seems to be so far over everyone else's . . . well, you get the idea. I'm no moral nihilist but I'm probably a societal nihilist (does such a term/classification even exist?). Everyone takes everything way too seriously, even things deliberately intended not to be taken seriously. Am I the only one?
    • No, you're not the only one. However, it is difficult for people to say that they identify with a morally reprehensible character without someone accusing them of being morally reprehensible themselves. Many people find his attempted rape of Sally difficult to overlook, even if they can see merit to his attitude about other things.
      • Wait, what?! He murders an unarmed civilian (and I'm not talkin' about murdering someone who kidnapped, killed, chopped up and fed to his dogs a little girl, he shoots an innocent woman who just so happens to also be pregnant and oh-yeah-by-the-way it's Blake's) and the attempted rape (later completed voluntarily, by the former victim's account) is what people can't overlook?! I guess I have another JBM now. Feeling bluer and bluer every day.
        • Hardly an unarmed woman; the seconds before he shoots her, she breaks a bottle and seriously slices in to his face with it. If her swing was a couple inches lower, she could have easily sliced open Blake's neck and killed him.
        • She dropped the bottle when he was aiming at her. She was unarmed and she wasn't a treat to his life, he was just pissed off because his pretty face got screwed up (that also got his rage up with Sally). I pity the man that tries to pass as self defense killing a pregnant woman that cutted him in the face with a bottle and then drops it and ask for mercy while crying...Pity I said? I would laugh at him while he gets his ass fried on the electric chair.
        • "She dropped the bottle when he was aiming at her"... dirty little secret of the infantry, especially pre-embedded reporting: "hey, I tried to kill you but I screwed up can I surrender now?" more often than not gets a bullet in response.
        • Actually many women lie to and seduce horny troops into impregnating them so that the soldier will be forced to take her back into the states and marry her, mooching off of him for the rest of his life. How about not playing the giult card with the guy cackling along with his trusty flamethrower?
          • Oh please. Blake's not an idiot. He must have been well aware that sleeping with a woman (presumably sans protection; the Pill was hardly widespread in those days) was likely to lead to pregnancy. He's hardly a victim; how about keeping it in your pants?
            • Uh, nobody ever claimed he was a victim in the above posts. Besides, it's very heavily implied murdering a pregnant woman was not beyond his range of experiences.
    • That's the point. The Comedian is a deconstruction of America and the American Dream: as a country, the US, like all countries, has a lot of Kick the Dog moments (if the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay didn't hate us when they were captured, they sure as hell hate us now). As for Blake's baby-momma, I thought it was a combination of blasting Viet Cong for days on end and an unconscious Secret Test of Character for Dr. M: "You could've turned the bullets into snowflakes or the bottle into (something harmless) or even sent us to fucking Australia but you didn't!" It just shows how different Blake (Heroic Sociopath) is compared to Dr. M (Ineffectual Loner). That scene's interesting, purely because even prior to Baby-Momma's appearance, Blake is miserable at a time when one would assume he'd be thrilled. He fought a war, his natural element, and better yet, America beat Vietnam. But instead, the cracks are showing (the movie makes this even clearer with the reading of 'Bitter? Me?' followed by a big, false smile and 'I think it's hilarious.') and he can't help looking at the bigger picture. (Paralleling Veidt, and of course, Dr. Manhattan. And on the opposite side to Rorschach, who obsesses over the small details. It's fascinating, because of course, Rorschach worships the Comedian, and their end is similiar - they'd rather die than live in a world where Veidt's plan succeeds. Despite how jaded, violent and generally repulsive they are, they still care.) Just like he hurts anyone with the knowledge that it doesn't matter, because the whole world's a joke, and everyone's going to die soon anyway; he can't feel joy about the petty stuff he claims to care about - his country, women, violence; for the same reasons. If America had gone crazy, as a nation, it would have made no difference. Blake's halfway to crazy at this point himself.
      • I saw the comedian as a deconstruction of Batman, like most of the other major characters. The Comedian is a freelance defender of the traditional social order; his crimes are always against "uppity" women. His faults reflect the corruption of the underlying society. On the other hand, he is not without virtues. His actions during the riot are excessive, but work to protect society.
        • His actions protected society? Hell no, they protected his little superhero fraternity, and nothing more. The protesters where demanding the Keene Act.
    • I agree. Even our money is a joke. The dollar is money only because the government says it's money. Why do people spend so much of their life working so they can have bigger numbers in a computer and some pieces of green paper? Why does anyone consider it valuable to trade for anything? Lots of people I meet expect me to act perfectly and any indication that I have emotions and do not like being walked over means they never speak to me again (especially if they were the ones in the wrong). The Joker put it well, "Why, so, serious?
      • So our money is a joke because... it's money, and operates exactly how money does. Huh?
      • No. Fiat Money. It has value because authority says it does. That's the joke. Haha.
      • Only fiat money has ever existed. Gold? Utterly worthless except for electronics or reactor shielding. Silver? Likewise. Diamonds? They can make them out of anything. What can you find that has intrinsic value that doesn't vary from person to person? Not even sex will work. So, what, a barter system? So inherently flawed as to be unworkable. The idea of money is one of the best jokes I know. Besides all that, US currency is more valuable than gold because think about it, what backs the money? The country. The whole country. How much is New York City worth? It's infinite. You couldn't buy it, not the whole thing. We don't have gold reserves, but we have uncounted tons of valuable country to back our money. So stop telling that joke and what takes over? How do you get the things you need? I'm with the Comedian. Human beings are pretty damn funny.
      • Of course, if you take this to its logical conclusion you get anarchism, which is, it would seem, Older Than They Think.
    • I don't * identify* with The Comedian because while I agree that much of the world is a big fucking joke I don't go around participating in the worst atrocities I can in order to somehow prove it. Then again, most people who say they "identify" with Rorschach haven't quit their jobs to go around beating the shit out of criminals either, so...
    • Don't feel bad. This troper finds himself agreeing with the Comedian on certain issues, and with Rorschach. Society is a depraved joke. People worship mankind, society, and the nation as if they were gods, and not merely collections of people who are in no way superior to themselves. And there's something tempting about Dr. Manhattan's detachment as well.
    • Whew, I feel better now. Re-reading the books and my post, maybe the "one and only aspect" part was off. "One of the few aspects" is probably more accurate.
    • The fact is, all the characters were made with something one can identify with. Most of the main characters see the world as crapsack for one reason or another, and all of them have pretty good reasons for it. The comedian laughs at the fact that nothing is funny anymore, Rorshach figures that, if he can just kill enough of the bad people, maybe everybody else will just "wake up" (face it, even though he calls everybody junkies and whores, he has to think there's something worth saving, or else he'd have quit long ago), Ozymandias decides that humanity as a whole is so thick, the only thing that'll get them to stop their petty tribal conflicts is the death of millions by a mutual threat, and Dr. Manhattan has washed his hands of the world altogether. Many of us can identify with one of these points of view, even if we don't (or can't) act on them as the heroes do. And then you have Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, who, underneath the spandex, are just regular people caught up in something far bigger than themselves, and aren't really sure what to do.
      • I think the above explains mostly my discomfort and lack of sympathy for most of the characters. The only character that is sympathetic is Hollis Mason, and he dies!
    • Jeffrey Dean Morgan addressed this issue when asked "Do you identify with something in your character?": "What? (laughs) Oh, yes. Murdering pregnant girls and trying to rape women are part of my personality. (more laughter) Kennedy? Never liked that guy. Seriously, nothing. As an actor are interesting aspects in the Comedian and you can sympathize with him besides the atrocities."
  • My take on The Comedian is this. The Comedian believed that nuclear war was inevitable. The world was doomed, and nothing anyone did mattered. Even his own actions don't matter, so he's going to do whatever the hell he feels like. He might as well shoot his Vietnamese lover, or rape Silk Specter, since they're all just going to die anyway. It doesn't matter! Yet people kept going on with their daily lives and planning for the future, as though there was going to be a future! Isn't that hilarious, that people act as though their lives matter when the world is about to end any minute now? It's nothing but a fucking joke! When he starts participating in Veidt's plan, he has a Villainous Breakdown, not because he feels guilty about all those deaths or because he thinks the plan won't work, but because he thinks it will work. If there isn't going to be a nuclear war, then actions really do have consequences, which means that he's no longer just a comedian making fun of the futility of existence. He's a monster, and he doesn't know what to do any more. And then he dies. The Comedian is the only character in the story to have a redemption arc (of sorts); he was an evil bastard, but you can still feel sorry for him.
    • Wow, that's interesting. But yeah, that makes sense really.
    • A good theory in general, but when The Comedian tried to rape Silk Spectre, the nuclear bomb didn't even exist yet. He was already a cynical bastard way before the threat of a nuclear war arose. I agree with your point about his Heel Realization, though.
  • My personal theory was that the Comedian was acting out for enforcement against the things he does. Rorschach theorizes that he was a parody of society, but maybe that parody was a joke that everyone misinterpreted: He was trying to shock people to discourage them from behaving how he had, yet, to his dismay, they kept praising him as a hero. No one ever told him that he had gone too far like what he wanted them to. They even kept him under government employment after the Keene Act. His lesson was that faith in heroes can be dangerously misplaced, but it backfired. Even the woman he tried to rape forgave him.
  • This troper views the Comedian as something of an aborted revolutionary; he saw the "joke", but retreats into nihlism, playing along with it for as long as it was in his interests to do so. Neither Ubermensch nor Last Man, but a sort of covert Nietzsche Wannabe. Given that Moore is a self-described anarchist, one can't help but wonder if this was intentional.

Metastory, Trope Use, Adaptation Issues

  • What Just Bugs Me is reading all the 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.
        • Just going to put this here: Rabid creatures should be put down.
  • Look, maybe this is just me, but I've never understood just how Ozymandias became so freaking uber in the last few comics. I mean, this is a world where superpowers are explicitly stated not to exist, barring Jon as a unique exception (mumble mumble cloned the brain of a psychic mumble), but Veidt is just ridiculous. Effortlessly defeating Nite Owl and Rorschach despite being much older than them (and I can't imagine when he finds time to hit the gym with everything else he does) is bad enough, but catching a bullet?? Why doesn't it go right through his hand and into his body?
    • He isn't that much older, and remember that this is a guy who's explicitly said to have been honing his body to the very peak of physical perfection, unlike plump, out-of-shape Dan or likely-malnourished and already-injured Rorschach. Ozy's also the smartest man in the world, and if you watch the fight closely you can see what he does to set them off balance - a key thing is that he yanks on Rorschach's mask, necessitating that Ror pause and adjust it because he's kind of obsessive about that. He knows them both well enough to exploit those weaknesses. Besides, Ozy beat the Comedian, a highly experienced government operative, before the first book. He was always that uber. As for the bullet-catch, uh, I'm going to go with calculating angles and lines of fire and distribution of force? It does go into his hand a bit and knocks him off his feet.
      • Also probably intersects with Ozymandias's "travels to the east". When he catches the bullet he's going in for what appears to be some sort of kung fu flying kick, so I read that as implying the 'catch the bullet' trick is some little technique he learned from a martial arts master somewhere a la Batman.
      • It's also possible that the whole "catching the bullet" thing is actually a combination of Kevlar body armor and sleight of hand. I wouldn't put it beyond Ozy to simply let them believe he's actually that good.
        • 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"—it's a result of the heroes being adaptations of Charlton Comics, which mainly had Badass Normal heroes aside from the quasi-Superman Expy Captain Atom. That said, most of these Badass Normals were very heavy on the Charles Atlas Superpower stuff (the original Blue Beetle, inspiration for Nite Owl, even had a "mystic scarab" that gave him peak-human-condition martial arts skills and athleticism without much training). Ozymandias is a pastiche of Thunderbolt, who is one of several old-school pulp heroes who achieves the "peak of human condition" through a collection of various mystic-babble abilities (meditation, martial arts, special diet, etc.) Ozymandias plays off this trope beautifully in the book, actually peddling his version of a Charles Atlas course teaching you how to be like him.
      • 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 has typical misunderstandings about quantum mechanics, and misrepresents James Randi. The reason that Alan Moore had Ozymandius do comic book nonsense despite making Dr. Manhattan the only super-powered person is that Alan Moore doesn't understand that those things are comic book nonsense.
  • 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.
  • Alternative explanation: Ozymandias cheated. We know he has beyond-realistic levels of scientific capacity in the field of genetics specifically. Its not out of the question that he, at some point between his fight with the Comedian and the present, juiced himself and augmented his own physical capacities. He just never told anyone because he preferred to come off as a mysterious martial arts guru.
  • Why did the movie seem to go so far out of its way to tell the audience who the villain was? In the comics, up until The Reveal Ozymandias's personality was that of an intelligent businessman with some idealistic goals; in the movie he seemed cold and imperious from the get-go. His costume was changed from shiny gold to dark synthetic armour. The attempt on his life involved a bullet between the eyes for a man who Ozymandias was moments prior having a tense argument with. He was even given Captain Metropolis's red herring motivation against The Comedian, as now the Crimebusters were his brainchild that The Comedian savagely shot down. What's the deal? Did they figure the audience wouldn't accept a superhero turned supervillain? Did they think they would be frustrated at a mystery where, heaven forbid, they didn't know who the bad guy was until the end?
    • This bothered me too. I wonder if they weren't going for The Untwist, in this increasingly Genre Savvy time. Think about it...all the other suspects are morally grey at best, so making one character seem like the messiah would be a bit of a dead giveaway.
  • Would most modern comics even have the chance to be told in extended page length chapters full of slow character development, novel like plot progression and narration, more dialog and less action, and sections full of prose, to tell an entire story like a novel, or would such a project just get canceled before it was finished? Most of Alan Moore's stories take time to simmer in the back of comic anthologies until they're ready to be collected as one story, but today's single issue comics lack that freedom and need everything to happen immediately. Watchmen is an example of the graphic novel done right, so why don't more companies use a similar publishing format for telling complete stories instead of relying on 22 page serials with a required shock at the end of each issue?
    • You do find companies that publish graphic novels in one go, they just tend to be small press independents who don't always get the same shelf space as DC and Marvel.
  • Why the hell was Manhattan's voice so high and soft and boyish in the film? It made him sound like a shy, nerdy ninth-grader, and I couldn't take him seriously. Does the actor really sound like that all the time?! Seriously, what the hell? He sounds like, meemeeemeeeemeemeep...
    • A. I never got that impression. Maybe there's something wrong with your TV. B. This section is for asking questions about confusing plot points and Fridge Logic, not complaining about how you don't like someone's voice.
      • A. I saw it in theatres, along with most of my family. It bugged all of us. B. It sure did Just Bug Me, and it also made me wonder if it was supposed to add something to the character which didn't come across. Upon further reflection, I wonder if the fact he has a rather soft, childlike voice despite being all tall and muscular is supposed to symbolize how he seems all-powerful but is actually controlled by fate and therefore powerless?
      • Before his transformation his voice was quite normal sounding and he is capable of a manlier voice as indicated by his TV outburst. If you ask this troper he was probably using that voice to try and not scare people since he has quite an intimidating presence.

Random Character Moments, Odds And Ends

  • So what exactly was it that started psychologically breaking Rorschach in the first place? I know the scene with the dogs sent him off the edge, but what started him breaking down?
    • Presumably, his entire childhood. The day-to-day superheroing probably didn't help either.
      • Indeed. The dog scene was probably when he broke down because he was finally forced to kill anything(IIRC, he was attacked by the dogs, though the movie goes too quickly on the whole flashback), he used to go "lighter" on the crooks until then. From there he went downhill.
        • Nope, he wasn't attacked by the dogs in either medium. He cleaved them in the head after he figured out that they were used to dispose of the little girl's remains. In the comic he says it was Kovacs that brought the cleaver down on the dog's head and closed his eyes, and it was Rorsharch that opened his eyes.
  • Rorschach is apparently well known and feared by the underworld, judging by the reactions when he enters those seedy bars. In the comic there is a scene where he is walking down the street, some prostitute propositions him and flips the bird when he walks away. In the equivalent scene in the film she even taunts him. Given his reputation, it is odd that she fails to recognise him and realise that it would be unwise to provoke a vigilante who is known to be violent to lowlifes.
    • Violent to male lowlifes. At least on-screen.
  • 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 have—he was evidently pretty upset by the idea—so Ozy took him out just in case. (The real question is why he let Dan and Laurie live.)
      • 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.
        • Quite. His level of assurance was so great even Rorschach's departure didn't cause him to intervene. He knew his friends that well.
          • I had always assumed it was actually a bit of revenge for the Comedian beating him in hand to hand comba. It's mentioned in Veidt's interview with the Nova Express that Blake defeated him in a 'misunderstanding'when Veidt was just starting out. Years later Blake sees the island,spillls the beans to Moloch who Veidt was already watching due to the Manhattan cancer thing, and sees an oppertunity to kill (presumably) one of the only people to beat him. Just Ozzy trying to mend his ego a bit.
      • Because the Comedian threatened Veidt's Batman Gambit, but Laurie and Dan didn't. Veidt says himself that even he couldn't predict what the Comedian was going to do, since he (the Comedian, not Ozymandias/Veidt) was cracking.
    • In addition to being scared of the Comedian ruining his plans, who's to say Veidt didn't also have a flat-out grudge against him? The flashback Veidt has at Blake's funeral, implied to be his most prominent memory of the Comedian, is one in which he accuses Ozy of being powerless against the Arms Race crisis. Maybe Ozy took advantage of the Comedian catching on as an excuse to kill him AND send him the message that if he's out of the way, Ozy can make a difference.
  • So, ok, the comedian had to die because he get an idea what Ozy planed. But what List exactly did he found and how could he find this hint of a plan of the most intelligent man on the planet?
    • He found the island while flying overhead and investigated it. It turned out it was the island where the missing people were being held, which is good enough reason for him to investigate further. At one point, he finds a list of the people who are to be given cancer to incriminate Jon and he eventually works out the plan from there. His finding out about it was sheer bad (good?) luck.
    • Personally, I think Ozymandius killed the Comedian because the Comedian wanted him to kill him. The Comedian was not opposed to Ozymandius' plan, but was distraught over how the world becoming saved would invalidate his entire nihilistic existence. So, the Comedian waited, unarmed and alone, after contacting Moloch in an apartment he knew Ozy was spying on, for Ozymandius to come kill him, and Ozy obliged. Think about it - why would you go back to your home, sitting at night, calmly waiting and watching television, when you are a badass who fights with guns and armour who knows your arch enemy is about to attack and kill you? This was an JBM for me about the movie - that they had this long fight scene, when in the comics the fight scene was very much shorter with no scenes of the Comedian attempting to fight back, narrated by Ozy who claimed that the Comedian had realised his own obsolecence and sought out Moloch intentionally, giving the fight much more of the feel of an execution.
  • Why doesn't Dr. Manhattan wear clothes?
    • It's an indication of how detached he is; how he doesn't really care for societal norms any more. Notice how, in the flashbacks, he wears less and less clothing as he grows more distant. Just something to make him a little more alien and a little more godlike.
      • This troper reads it as an ironic reference to the Book Of Genesis, specifically how Adam and Eve felt shame and covered their nakedness after eating from the Tree Of Knowledge. You could say that Jon's eaten the whole damn tree, and as a result, he feels no shame or need to cover his body.
    • Simply put, he slowly realized that no one can make him wear clothes if he doesn't want to. He doesn't need them to keep warm or clean, so he just doesn't wear them.
    • It's symbolism, showing that, for all his power, he's still a sexual being. Hell, he falls for Sally Juspeczyk after Janey Slater gets old.
    • Relatedly, why does it bug everyone that they show his privates in the movie? OMG, no! Naked blue man!
  • Can someone tell me how is it that even though Veidt is the smartest guy in the world, he couldn't think of a better password that his name and what's behind his desk?
    • He may have done that on purpose. Perhaps he knew Rorschach and Nite Owl were going to investigate him and he wanted someone to gloat to. At least, that's how I see it.
    • Or Veidt may not be the smartest man in the world. He doesn't regard himself as such, merely that he has good PR.
    • Because it would have been suspicious to not have a password at all, so he left the most obvious one he could find. If they'd been in his office a week earlier, the password would have been a string of twenty six random characters.
    • Because this book was written in the 80s. It may be a trope all on its own that TV-shows have passwords a person can guess by knowing about the person.
    • It's implied that Veidt wanted his password to be found, but only by his friends. Otherwise they would have been killed by the last phase of the plan.
  • Two points and an Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: why does everyone mention that we outlasted the Cold War when this was written during the Cold War; two, part of Dan Dreiberg's appeal was that he was a slightly squishy pot-bellied human, not quite cute as in the film and three, Ozymandias's shoes in the film. They are HUGE.
    • Hollywood casts pretty people when average ones would do, and above average people when unattractive people would do.
  • The fact that the guy who killed half of New York is the most optimistic and hopeful person in the book bugs me. Does it bug anyone else?
    • Bothers me because no one smiles except for him. Come on, lighten up!
    • Kind of makes sense. Ozymandias has to be an optimist, he has to believe that this is the best of all possible worlds, otherwise, what's the point? Pessimist: "Millions of people are dead, and hundreds more all over the world have Gone Mad From the Revelation." Optimist: "The sacrifice of a few million will ensure the continued survival of billions."
      • No, no, it doesn't bug me that Ozymandias is an optimist. It bugs me that no one else is.
    • Always look on the bright side of death!
    • Dunno from the film, but in the book at the end he doesn't seem incredibly optimistic to me; he puts on a front of confidence and optimism when his plan's gone through and it looks like he's won, but then he confides to Dr. Manhattan at the end that he's making himself feel the death of every person he killed, he confesses his nightmare, he practically begs Manhattan to tell him he's done the right thing and that he's made the world better... that sounds like someone struggling from a pretty serious case of doubt rather than someone who is the most optimistic and hopeful person around.
  • I find it weird that Silhoutte's murderer was polite enough to write "Lesbian whores!" instead of "Dyke whores!".
    • Was dyke in common parlance at the time? And if it was, was it a slur? And if it was a slur, was it an effective one? Technically "gypsy" is a slur, but no one thinks of it as one.
    • 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 personal standards—just because you're committing a homophobic murder is no reason to use vulgar language.
    • 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.
  • This is considered the pinaccle of comic book literature over Kingdom Come.
    • It's mostly a matter of taste. Both books are, without a doubt, exceptional. Which book someone feels is better depends mostly on what they're looking for.
    • I would argue that there's more story in Watchmen. Not that that's necessarily the end-all-be-all of quality, but it helps. And Watchmen is its own universe, so Alan Moore was forced to take his Expies and build from the ground up so that all readers would be on equal footing without any knowledge of the characters involved. Kingdom Come is mostly about characters that readers are expected to be somewhat familiar with. And honestly, I prefer Marvels over Kingdom Come.
    • No Mention of The Sandman?!?!?
    • Or Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth??
  • What did the death of the prisoner Rorschach threw the grease on have to do with the sudden release of all the prisoners from their cells? If they could break out and get at him before, why did only the guy and his henchmen go to taunt him before everyone else started rioting, and then wait for the guy's heart to stop (how did they even know?) before attacking? (If this is included in the book, I haven't had a chance to read it yet.)
    • They weren't "released", there was a riot. Prison riots happen, and sometimes some of the inmates get loose. They couldn't break out and get to him at any time. The reason Big Figure and his goons go to taunt him before hand is because they have some leverage over the guard (they're shown talking to him, and asking about his wife and kid in the comic).
      • 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 german accent vary in the film? Sure, he puts on an American accent in public, but even when he is in private the german tinge seems to fluctuate. Like when he talks to Dan it is very heavy and pronounced, yet at the end it is only lightly there. Does the actor's accent just slip?
    • 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.
  • After they drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Jon's father says what boils down to "They have atomic bombs now, therefore watchmakers are useless". I'm sorry, that fails logic forever. I mean, is he talking about relativity? Because it's not like relativity only existed after the bomb.
    • Not really. He doesn't mention atomic bombs, he is talking about relativity. In fact, his actual line is something like, "They say time is all relative now, no point in making watches."
    • Also, note Jon Osterman's origins as a "watchmaker." This is a reference to the theory in Deism in where "the world is a watch and God was a watchmaker who left the universe to move on and work on another watch(or world). This "watch" theme is also displayed through the reoccurring "bloody smiley" that symbolically resembles a clock ticking five minutes away from twelve. Keeping up with the Deist themes is the ending where Jon(now Dr. Manhattan) leaves Earth to "perhaps create some life out there." Practically, although Jon is now a God and above normal men, he is still a watchmaker, and he is done with the world and is now moving on to better things by metaphorically creating other watches. Thus, because the world is a "watch," we are all little "watchmen" in it watching over one another. It alludes to what John F. Kennedy said about us all being "the watchmen of the world."
  • Why does Moloch have Pointy Ears?
    • Probably he modified them for dramatic effect when he was a supervillain, and never got around to having the cosmetic surgery to fix them.
    • According to the comic, he once was a stage magician. He had them then, so it was likely for making himself more "mystical".
  • Maybe it's just a Red Herring, but the supplementary material of Rorshach's pysch file has a childhood note he wrote about admiring Truman for making the tough call and dropping the Bombs on Japan to end the war. Shouldn't someone with this viewpoint have gone along with Ozymandias's plan once he knew?
    • That was entirely the point. Rorshach despised Veidt's plan, but realized the hypocrisy of doing so while still supporting Truman's actions. This, combined with the realization that whether or not he told the world about the ruse he would be violating his own moral code, is what finally broke him.
      • Or it could simply be that you are missing the point. Truman attacked a legitimate military target of an actively hostile nation engaged in war, in order to end the war. Veidt attacked a city of innocent bystanders not as yet engaged in any war with him, in order to deceive them into doing what he wished. He didn't see New York as enemies to be killed until they surrendered, he saw them as props to be used for his global theatrics.


Moral Implications Of Book Vs Film Endings

  • It bugs me how the underlying moral of the story seems to have been changed from the book to the film. Ok, I'll admit this may be just a personal thing. But here's how I see it; in the book, Ozymandias' plan boils down to this: make the USA and USSR unite against an alien threat and therefore promote a peaceful coexistance between the two, the moral being that when the chips are down people will work together to survive and that all thats needed for world peace is a big enough threat for the world to unite against. In the film, the plan is roughly the same except instead of a manufactured alien, Veidt frames Dr Manhattan and the USA and USSR unite against him instead. Thats a little more unsettling to me because of the numerous comparisons across both adaptations between Manhattan and a god. Veidt essentially puts the fear of a god into the world. Suddenly the moral changes from "World peace relies on us all uniting against a common (but still natural) threat" to one of two alternatives, either "World peace relies on the abolishment of religion, the rejection of God, so that we can all come to an agreed atheistic world view" or alternately "World peace will only happen when God himself intervenes and punishes us, forcing us to coexist". Speaking as a liberal agnostic, neither one of those sit very well with me and I'm sure that they probably weren't intended by whoever wrote the screenplay, but Watchmen is the kind of work people read into, and this is what I read.
    • I don't see what the problem is. As a conservative Christian, I actually kind of like the latter moral. All things considered, throwing the fear of God (whether literal or figurative) back into people would probably go a long way toward establishing true world peace (even if only a temporary peace). Even if you don't believe in any type of god or gods you have to admit that the threat of punishment is a pretty powerful motivator for moral behavior. And as you say, people will read into it what they want, so people can choose whatever of those two morals they prefer. Or alternatively, they could choose neither one. After all, who's to say either one of those is the message behind the movie? Maybe the movie's message is identical to the book and you're just reading too much into it. Or maybe the movie doesn't have a deeper message at all. Maybe the book doesn't even have a deeper message at all. Maybe the story never had a message in the first place. And maybe that is the intended message. That sounds like something Alan Moore would do, get everybody feverishly searching through his book for a message that doesn't really exist as a social commentary on how people are constantly seeking hidden meanings that don't really exist.
      • As a conservative Jew, I find this terrifying. I'm sorry. There is much wrong with the idea that the world has to unite against a vengeful, angry god.
        • As a Flying Spaghetti Monster, I find all of these morals offensive because they do not acknowledge my noodly omniscience.
          • As an atheist, I find the former moral to be correct. Religion is responsible for millions of deaths, thousands of years of hate and more than a few human rights violations. Had religion never come into existence, many wars would have never happened, many lives would have never been prematurely snuffed out and millions of people could have been happy.
            • And as a person who has actually read history, I am mindboggled at the theory that removing one historical excuse used by greedy and powerhungry rulers to send armies out to kill and loot will somehow result in said rulers deciding to just pack it in and live peacefully... as opposed to simply using another excuse to try and justify their greed and powerlust. Yes, religion has been invoked by people to try and justify having a war. And so have nationalism, tribalism, various competing schools of economics, and even the very concept of freedom itself. That doesn't make all of these things automatically bad things. It makes war a bad thing, but hey, we knew that already.
      • Bullshit. You can't say "well, if this one thing hadn't happened, everything else wouldn't have happened." You don't know, and one thing that's been made painfully clear throughout human history is that we homo sapiens are really really good at coming up with reasons to kill each other. If it hadn't been "my God is better than your God" behind a given conflict, it would've been, "Your land is better at making crops than my land."
    • As someone in the middle (grew up as a catolic christian, study mythology and comparative theology and I think that God maybe exist/existed but I believe that he maybe doesn't interfere on human existence as much as we made out to/or wish, because he can't/won't/is for the best/who knows but again is all a maybe) I think the movie message was just bringing it all into full circle: The presence of Dr. Manhattan brought the imbalance of power to the Watchmen universe that lead to almost nuclear war, it was only fair/just that he was used to bring peace and balance again.
    • Arguably, the problem wasn't the existence or rejection of God, it was the fact that God very clearly favored one people (Americans) over another (everyone else, but specifically Russia). "God exists, and he's American." So Russia was put into a situation where they literally could not win and there was nothing they could ever do about it. The reason that multiple religions can exist is because there's a reason to doubt everyone else: Jesus might or might not be the son of God, Mohammed may or may not have been God's favorite prophet, Hebrews may or may not be God's chosen people. Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, it's safe to assume that any of these are correct. But Doctor Manhattan was clearly there and he would fuck your shit up if you weren't on the right team. So in a world where God literally favors one people over another, and the only recourse for the other is the end of the world, Ozymandias chose to eliminate the threat. Since he couldn't eliminate Russia, he went with Doctor Manhattan.
      • Regardless of whether or not Dr. Manhattan is acknowledged as a god by the Russians, Ozymandias' plan in the comic was to unite the US and Russia against an alien threat. In the movie, it's supposedly the same thing, except that Ostrander has decades of siding with the U.S. against everyone else. How did the U.S.S.R. not see the destruction of several major cities in a manner that pointed directly at Dr. Manhattan as an attack by the U.S.?
    • I actually disagree with the notion that the moral is about uniting under the fear of god, because Manhattan isn't a god. He's a human being; a very powerful and alien human being, but still a human being, that represents a universal threat to both sides. Whether the threat is a human, an alien, or a deity, however, the human reaction is the same: unify against it and, ultimately, try to kill it.
      • It really comes down to your definition of "god." In terms of worship, no. Which, in our world, is basically all God is: a being that may or may not exist, but whatever state He or She is in, God needs worship badly. But on the other hand, when faced with a being who is literally capable of disassembling you molecule by molecule and would not care, you might as well call it a god.
    • I always believed that in both works, the "Manhattan is God" idea was rejected when "he" started giving people cancer. The movie simply took it a step further by turning him into the threat. It isn't a "fear of god" thing so much as a "fear of a blue guy who had us all thinking he was god so we're already kind of bitter" thing.
      • The main problem I have with the ending change has nothing to do with the moral ramifications of Dr.Manhattan being god, it's the fact that he has been shown to be invincible capable of bringing down countries alone, with zero effort on his part. For all intents and purposes, in terms of both power and ability, he IS a god compared to anyone else. Here's the issue, how is humanity supposed to rally against a god? They can't and they should know they can't, they've seen what hes capable of. Against the aliens they know they have a chance, the first one died, so they know the others can, it would just take an united front against them.
        • That may be the point. The world can't beat him, so they'll unite to toe the line to make him happy.

Ozy And Manhattan Assumptions

  • Why does everyone expect Ozymandias's plan to fail? It looks to me like the guy knows what he's doing. He can play evidently play the world governments, his old co-workers, the media, and a living god like a fiddle, gleam fairly accurate predictions of future trends from information presented, fool people, and hide things in plain sight. It seems as though once the people started listening he could get them to play nice.
    • Because it's so fragile. All it takes is one loose cannon in the right place at the right time to make everything fall apart.
      • Not really. Because everyone knows Adrian Veidt is a good man. He's a philantropist; he's a genius whose inventions have benefitted everyone; he's a world-class gymnast despite being middle-aged; he's the only former superhero who still has the respect of the public; he's an upcoming star of his own Saturday morning cartoon. As far as anyone knows, he represents all that is good in ther world. Who's going to believe someone suggesting that he ordered his own assassination? After all, most people don't know he can't catch bullets. Moreover, anyone accusing him of trying to start World War Three is clearly insane, since World War Three clearly hasn't started; on the contrary, world peace looks like a real possibility. Quite frankly, the only people who'll believe it are lunatics.
        • That assumes none of those loose cannons can produce any evidence proving what Adrian has done. There's no telling what's in Rorschach's journal, or what evidence the journal might lead to. Adrian may be the smartest man on Earth but he's still human and therefore fallible. Given the incredible complexity of his plan, one tiny mistake could doom it.
        • Well, we get to observe Rorshach for most of his investigation, and he doesn't seem to have solid evidence of anything. Only suspicions. Anything those suspicions might have led to has been covered up thoroughly. Anyone who could confirm the story is dead. Evidence seems pretty hard to come by.
    • "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.
  • Did Dr. Manhattan really killed people permanently? I mean it looks like he does to them the same thing that happened to himself (removing their magnetics fields) so is possible that if any of them had the same will to come back they could rebuild themselves but for some reason none of them haven't he might be doing this to see if someone else could pull the same trick at some point. I like to fan wank that Roschard will to punish crime would allow him to come back as a dark more willing to kill because of his own initiative Dr. Manhattan. Maybe he could call himself Dr. Antarctica.
    • Even assuming he is indeed using the same exact process, it takes a lot more than sheer force of will to come back from it. It seems that in-depth knowledge of particle physics and an analytical mind well-suited to piecing things together are required as well.
    • I think his watchmaker background was one of the main reasons he could comeback, since he learned from a young age about how smaller things fitting in harmony, togheter are needed to create complex mechanisms. I wonder why he never reflected on his own rebirth as miracle since the contradictions of him learning watchmaking from his father and then the same father doing the same with pushing him to become a scientist plus the broken watch and the automatic lock were what lead to him becoming Dr. Manhattan in the "end".
    • Dr. Manhattan said that the same experiment will never work again, and I think we can trust his word. So, any other IF Red creature is just lost forever. That sais, IF Ring people seems quite an foul move, as it just cause entropy. Turning them to inert matter would work better.
  • The smartest man in the world attempts to kill the most powerful being in the galaxy using the same method that gave that being his powers in the first place! I mean come on! What was Ozymandias thinking? It seems like such a fundamentally flawed plan to kill Manhattan
    • Well, nothing else anyone's thought of worked either and so he used the only thing he knew Doctor Manhattan to even be affected by. And it did slow him down a little.
    • Dr. Manhattan warned that the IFR process was not going to produce creature like him again. He didn't exposed any more on the topic, so there was possibly a chance that Dr. Manhattan himself could find impossible to reassemble himself. Sort of "once in the universe" process. Tiny chance, but what else was Veidt supposed to try? Asking him to sing the whole Ï€ ?
      • Oooh! Ask him to sing the score to the H.M.S. Pinafore!
  • Just how does Dr. Manhattan know that everybody's going to get blown to hell by nukes if the truth behind the squid gets realized? The tachyons were screwing with his ability to perceive the future and manage his way through the timescape (like where he tells Rorschach that he informed Laurie about something twice, once while he was entering and once while he was actually talking to Rorschach), and his other powers don't seem to be affected (he teleported anyways, and was still able to do everything else he did under the influence of them).
    • I never got the impression that Dr. Manhattan was using any kind of special foresight when he said that they couldn't reveil the truth behind the squid. In fact, all he said was "Logically, he's right. Exposing this plot, we destroy any chance of peace, dooming earth to worse destruction." He was using logic to come up with this conclusion, not ESP or whatever. Although it could (and has, even on this page) been argued about whether or not exposing the truth would result in armagedon (although I think most of that argument is specifically about Rorschach's Journal), remember that Moore has a tendency to use Manhattan as a Straw Vulcan, and that in this instance, his deduction is meant to be taken at face value.
      • Also, Manhattan knows that he is the only thing preventing a nuclear war (he leaves for a few days and Nixon can barely keep from pushing the button). He knows that he's leaving, so without Manhattan or Ozymandias' new world order, there's nothing to stop the missiles.

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.
    • Of course.

Most it would do is create a conspiracy like JFK.

  • So Rorschach is supposed to be seen as paranoid kook - but how is it that his "mask killer" theory is supposed to make less sense than the actual plot?
    • Less sense? Rorschach's theory makes more sense than the actual plot, such that everyone is blind-sided by Ozymandias's ultimate victory. The problem is that, as stated above, Rorschach can't see beyond the small picture, and can't imagine it's more complicated than a simple plot to kill heroes.
  • Only just read it for the first time, so there's probably an answer: Why does everyone think Rorschach's journal could restart the arms race, given that he last wrote in it before his capture, and hence long before anything he had to say would be particularly earth-shaking?
    • Correction: He last wrote it just before he departed to Karnak, after he'd gotten proof that Veidt was responsible for whatever crazy business was about to happen.
    • For a certain given value of "proof," which consists of the semi-anonymous word of a madman in a fringe publication trying to bring down one of the most respected men in the western world. Yeah, I never thought that cliffhanger had a valid chance of stopping Veidt's plan. Not that I object to the world being saved...
      • 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 ideals—Veidt's plan is a One World Government based on a lie. Why not tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may? Shouldn't people be moral free agents, responsible enough to make their own, well-informed actions? Given that the heroes always get to find out the secret plan in fiction, I like to think you'd want to know, too, if you lived in the Watchmen-world (since the heroes are audience-surrogates.)
        • 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.
    • Whether or not the journal itself is enough of an information leak to cause Veidt's plan to unravel it points to all the other things he might have missed, the infinite unpredictable factors that could lead to someone finding out the truth.
    • Rorschach's journal possibly forms the basis for a new group of vigilantes who fight against Ozymandias' New World Order. They may not win, but they cause enough chaos and confusion to knock everything off track.
    • Because a puzzle is much easier to assemble if you know what the final picture is supposed to look like. In Ozy's headquarters, Nite Owl didn't do anything magical or extra-secret- he simply used Ozy's database to connect the dots and realized that the corporate pyramid behind everything had Ozy at it's pinnacle. There's nothing to stop anyone else from following the money and putting the final picture together the same way they did, especially now that they know that there's a unifying figure behind seemingly unconnected events- Moloch, Janey Slater, the various people who disappeared. . .


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.
    • Maybe they just never showed you the superhero comics, did you ever see any Giraffes in Book? No? Doesn't mean they don't exist.
    • Ever notice how there aren't a lot of Martian stories nowadays? The reality that we won't be getting any visits from Mars, pretty much dried up the stories. When their universe saw real superheroes, the allure went away and questions of reality drifted in. People would start wondering why Superman caused a train accident instead of lifting the stopped car out of the way or how he could catch Lois Lane when she falls off a building without killing her in the process. Plus you can't laugh off even the most ridiculous of villains if everytime you open the newspaper you read about some horrible thing a real masked vigilante just stopped. When superhero stories stopped selling as well as the pirate comics did, they were probably cancelled.
    • This Troper thinks that Moore was lampshading the popularity of superhero comics in the real world - saying in effect that the answer to 'why does the superheroe genre dominate the comics industry and the medium' is 'why not, it could have been ANY genre. Like pirates, for instance.' When superheros faded from popularity in the real world, following WWII, science fiction, horror, and western comics took over; if DC had never revived and redesigned the Flash in 1956, we could easily have nothing but sword and sorcery titles on the racks. And, FWIW, this troper thought the idea of pirates dominating comics to be stupid - then realized that like superheroes, there are many possible kinds of pirate comics (16th century buccaneers, '30's road pirates, space privateers...)
      • And then, he saw how popular Pirates of the Caribbean and the card trading game Pirates of the Spanish Main were, and he promptly shut up.
      • Also FWIW, note in issue one that we see on the newsstand a comic called X-Ships. I'd like to know if the pirate ship Phoenix was in it and if it was all powerful and stuff.
      • 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 clothes—he's literally dressed as a dead criminal, a hangman with a black hood and noose around his neck. The whole reason superheroes came about was because he had the twisted idea to dress up in a mask, just like the crooks did, to fight them (the abyss gazes also, etc.). That's his canon reason for doing what he did and starting the whole fad. Everyone after him misread his intentions and started dressing in crazy ways to distinguish themselves.
      • 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 ostranenie.
        • Indeed, in this universe superhero comics predate real superheroes—Nite Owl I mentions being inspired by reading Superman comics as a boy. The history of superhero comics, including the wild and sudden popularity of Superman igniting a whole genre, still happens in this world—it just gets massively derailed by large numbers of people successfully doing it in real life.
    • 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.
    • My favorite example when people bring up how superhero comics are such a strange and narrow way for comics to have developed is to bring up manga. Manga has a lot of genres, including all sorts of things that aren't superheroes, to the point where it's the poster child for non-superhero comics. But there's a huge (and hugely popular) chunk of it that basically is superheroes in all but name. Naruto and Bleach are about people using incredible powers to fight each other. I don't agree that superhero comics are such an unlikely event. (Also, the rationale that real superheroes made them unpopular doesn't work well; fictional superheroes have powers and Watchmen-world real ones didn't, except for Dr. Manhattan. And Dr. Manhattan was still unlike comic book superheroes, just in the opposite direction.)
      • ...and I can't help but bring up One Piece, which is basicaly superhero pirates.
      • This troper would suggest that this simply reflects the human tendency to create larger-than-life heroes, as seen in both the heroic mythology- contemporary and historical- of almost every human culture, rather than of any objective tendency towards the particular, idiosyncratically American tropes of the superhero genre. To lose sight of this is to lose sight of the unique qualities of the superhero mythology, to render oneself unable to speculate as to the ubiquity of one particular genre within American comics, and so to rather miss the point of Watchman itself. Beowulf to Superman, Judge Dredd and Naruto may be a reasonably expected progression, but Beowulf to Superman, Batman and Spider-Man rather less so.
  • Not to mention that, basically, almost all mythological stories, from ancient times to the modern day are either Superhero stories or Human Animal stories. Sound familiar?
  • Because Superhero comics died out after real ones started popping up, would that mean Stan Lee never got his big break? I mean, I know it's a DC universe, but that's basically what's implied... right?
    • No, he's the well-known creator of Peter Parker, Pirate of Penzance.
  • The Silver Age was part of a backlash agianst comics started by the book The Seduction of the Innocent In the Watchmen universe, "The Seduction of the Innocent" was never published, the feds shuting down the guy who wrote to protect the reputation of "comic inspired" opperatives in the US military.

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?
    • Would you deliberately throw people into a test chamber and disintegrate them on the off chance that one would develop godlike powers? Sure, you wouldn't mind the deaths if were ruthless enough, what happens if you succeed? Now you've got a godlike being on your hands. And the last thing they remember is you throwing them into a test chamber and disintegrating them painfully.
    • Just because the circumstances of the accident that led to the creation of Doc can be replicated, doesn't mean the results can be. We don't know exactly what happened to Jon in the accident, but it's clear that it was an improbably rare event that isn't going to happen again anytime soon. That said, for all we know, the Russians had been trying to duplicate it, and had been losing people in test chambers for years.
    • 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 viewpoint—as a watchmaker—of putting everything together in its correct sequence (notice how he comes back, bit by bit at a time as he's reconstructing himself) is part of what helped him become Dr. Manhattan.
    • 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.
        • Yes, but the research center's research was * itself* classified. They were all government scientists working in top secret research. They were talking about it "publicly" in a company town staffed entirely by government employees. Remember that the whole concept of the "intrinsic field" was supposed to lead to the next A-bomb/WMD (which it indirectly did).
        • 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 work—and they had the exact same equipment used on him. It's safe to assume that the IFR can't replicate the events. Whether that's because the local universe is monotheistic, because only a very specific type of mind and situation can survive the IFR process, or because Manhattan himself would prevent others like him from forming, it's safe to see that he can be trusted on the matter.
          • 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.
        • I assumed that the Russians would definitely have attempted to replicate the experiment. Bearing in mind that you are trying to invest someone with god-like powers you'd have to be sure they were loyal. This means that experiments may have been halfway ethical, relying on security cleared volunteers, surely not too hard to find amongst very old people, especially with all that ideology and a healthy desire to put the US in it's place. I assumed the re-creation of a Dr Manhatten was just too unlikely. (Also just because Oz made a machine capable of obliterating Dr Manhattan, does not mean that he duplicated the experiment).
        • 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 accept—and, just as importantly, convince the working plebs beneath you to accept—when you have a hyper-powerful God walking around your own backyard. Plus, pretty much handing ultimate power in the Soviet sphere of influence to one of their own grunts or gulag-inmates—not something the hyper-paranoid, power-hungry types who ran the Soviet Union would be that enthusiastic about doing.
      • 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.
      • The experiment to create Dr Manhattan may not be repeatable, but the team at the original lab ran the field remover several times and so did Veidt. The Soviets would logically direct their attention to building a god-killing machine rather than a god-creating machine, as they can still get plans for the original device (since they don't have access to the Man himself, they don't necessarily know it isn't quite that easy - equally, just because Veidt's method didn't work doesn't mean it's impossible).
    • Perhaps they did try to replicate it and over the decades got absolutely nothing for their trouble but a few thousand people converted to radioactive vapor. It just...didn't work.
  • Why do people think that the US and USSR will just sit around, static and unchanging, until they stop being afraid of Dr. Manhattan/Giant Teleporting Psychic Alien Death Squids From Nowhere and resume nuking the hell out of each other? Nothing ever ends, but nothing ever stops, either. Look at what's happening at the end of the graphic novel - it's Glasnost, times two. Granted the lack of open conflict with the West changes things as well, but by the time Cold War tendencies reassert themselves, Veidt's plan may very well have brought down the Soviet Union.
    • This question has been raised so many times on this page in one form or another. In short, the answer is always: That's the point. Ozymandias's peace is by no means guaranteed permament, and it remains extremely up in the air as to whether it was worth the atrocities he committed.
      • But my point is that even if Adrian's peace doesn't last forever, that doesn't mean he'd have failed. Assuming the USSR's internal politics are anything like they were in the real world, he only needed to buy enough time for the country to collapse from within.
        • Seems like the US would have collapsed from within, under 16 years of Nixon. The Soviet Union was brought down because of Gorbachev's willingness to allow states to secede from the USSR, plus the US massively outspent the USSR in proxy warfare in Afghanistan. Meanwhile they appointed a Carter-esque liberal (Gorbachev). What really destroyed Communism was when the hard-liners attempted a military coup against Gorbachev, causing the then-powerless Russian Republic (controled by "neoliberals" such as Yeltsin) to secede from the USSR itself. (The rough US politics equivalent would be if the US had elected Ralph Nader president, allowed Vermont and Hawaii to secede and all our overseas bases, then Bush invalidated the election with tanks in the streets, prompting Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwartzenegger to secede NY and CA from the Union). None of this would have necessarily happened in an alternate timeline.
  • I can understand winning in Vietnam, but winning and Vietnam becoming the 51st state are two very different things. Seriously, what's the story behind that? Did they just abolish the South Vietnamese government after they won? Why didn't they cover this greater detail?
    • It didn't really matter. It was a throwaway nod to the politics of the Watchmen world. It said, "This is how powerful America has become with Manhattan on their side. They have the money, the resources, and the luxury of time such that they can incorporate an entire country into their fold as an equal member without undue effort." Moreover, it plays into the ambiguity of the setting: should America have conquered Vietnam, and, having done so, is it better or worse that they made them equal to anywhere else they've conquered?"
    • I'll be less charitable to Moore on this. In the eyes of an anti-war European who grew up during the 1960's, "becomes the 51st state" would be a shorthand way of saying "imperialistic oppression", and "Vietnam becomes the 51st state" is his worst nightmare for how the Vietnam War could turn out. The fact that US states are equals probably never crossed his mind; we only see it as ambiguous because we're not where Moore is politically.
    • Yeah, in short, Moore didn't really get what being a state actually meant. He probably intended it to be more like an annexed territory or something.
      • As much as I dislike the man, Moore did get it. States aren't equal. Depending on their size and population, they're stronger or weaker than others. That's why people who want to become president want certain states to vote for them. Because those states have the most power over who wins. US states aren't equals. Citizens of Rhode Island, for example, basically have no say in national politics. Besides for the president thing, bigger states have more Representatives in Congress, meaning that the larger states have more power. States that have smaller populations have less Representatives in Congress, meaning they have less of a say. Vietnam would make for a big state with lots of power. Bribe those Representatives (what do you think big business does with the Representatives?) to vote for what you want and you've got that much more control. Alan Moore did his homework.
      • Not really. Becoming a state requires the state's population itself deciding to become one. It's a willful decision to join up, and it's not something that would have been imposed, especially not as quickly as it seems to have happened in Watchmen. Hell, Puerto Rico has had a few votes on the subject and has actively decided not to become a state (one reason being that their current status allows them to get the benefits of being a state without the drawbacks of paying taxes). Moore wanted to show that Vietnam was a conquered territory of an imperialistic America, and that's not really what being a state of the union means.
        Hell, there's tons more reasons why people in the US wouldn't want Vietnam to be a state. For one, it's removed ideologically, geographically, and ethnically from the whole rest of the US. Do you really think that, say, New York or California are going to want a country half a world away both literally and metaphorically have as much of a say in national politics as they do?
        Moore didn't do his "homework," he tried to come up with a shorthand for "conquering America" and he missed the mark.
        As a sidenote, can you please stick to arguing about facts and stuff rather than using "people, particularly Americans, are utter douchebags" as the basis of all your arguments? It's getting a little tiring to read.
        • Who knows? Who cares? That's all just a lot of conjecture and speculation for a topic Alan Moore didn't really give much detail to in Watchmen.
    • Perhaps you're all forgetting the way the Viet Cong surrendered to Manhattan, thinking of him as more or less a god. Why wouldn't you want to be on god's side?
    • You Americans just don't get it. "X becomes the 51st state of America" is just a half-joke phrase in Europe and Post-USSR that is used to describe a country under heavy geopolitical influence of USA (so, yeah, sphere of interest expansion), not a literal US state.


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?
    • Maybe, maybe not. I seem to recall that Ozymandias hired the best geneticists in the world to create something that could convincingly pass for non-Earthly, down to the cellular level, and they had a decade and unlimited funds to work with. And it * was* 1987. "DNA testing" had not yet come into daily household use in the English-speaking world.
    • You're forgetting that this is a world in which genetic research is far more advanced than in our own, even now. So presumably DNA testing would be a familiar concept.
      • On the other hand, given how sophisticated they are in bioscience, if DNA testing is available Ozymandias' company would probably dominate the field. It's quite possible that he could... strategically manipulate any attempt to do an autopsy on the monster.
      • This raises an interesting question about science fiction: when current technology surpasses then-advanced "future" technology, is it reasonable to assume that it carried on the same path? Keep in mind, much of the technology advanced explicitly because of Dr. Manhattan; it's as likely as not that he just didn't care enough to say, "By the way, this is how you do DNA testing," and no one thought to ask because there was no money or weaponry to be made of it. So by the time you get to 1987, DNA testing isn't even in its infancy yet, because the scientists who would have been working on that shit were all busy with Super Science or whatever. Then Ozymandias becomes the Power Behind The Throne and keeps any technology that could reveal what he did from advancing.
        • What? Of course there's money and weaponry to be made of DNA research. Genetic engineering alone would be a massively profitable business and a huge boon to the military (why spend months putting a soldier through basic when you can simply engineer a faster, stronger, more intelligent soldier?). And genetic engineering cannot possibly exist without advanced DNA testing techniques.
        • America doesn't need super soldiers, we have Doctor Manhattan. We don't need biological weapons, we have Doctor Manhattan. We don't need disease-free crops, we have Doctor Manhattan. Since Veidt seems to be the only person who puts a lot of effort into genetics, it may well be that the government was too busy asking Manhattan to build death rays and shit to get into toying around with DNA, thus any advances come only from the world's smartest man rather than the super science of the world's smartest god.
            • I don't agree. The government has contingency plans for everything up to having to invade Canada. The idea that Dr. Manhattan is a single point of failure and that they need to have contingency plans for his disappearance is something that should occur even to bureaucrats.
    • It's mentioned in the post-event TV coverage that it appeared on an "institute researching other dimensions". If anyone notices the DNA similarity, they'll probably guess that it came from a very earth-like alternate dimension instead of thinking it's a fake.
      • The teleportation that killed it may have disrupted its structure to the point where no clearly undamaged DNA is available.
    • Want to bet that Ozymandias owns all the best DNA testing labs on Earth?
  • 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-existant Star Wars system crashed their economy. Its mentioned in the film that the Soviets had 50k nuclear missiles at hand, nearly twice the amount they had when they collapsed, just for their to be a chance for them to get through Dr. Manhattan. Having to sink so much time, money and labor into those missiles would leave essentially nothing left for them to build say farming equipment. They would have been having even worse mass famines and shortages in Watchman's version of the 80s than they did in the 30s. They should have collapsed years before the film took place.
    • 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.
      • Think about this: a world such as you describe... then Manhattan abruptly leaves one day. And our entire infrastructure revolved around things only he could do. Sure, it doesn't really answer the question at hand, I just find it pleasingly horrifying.
    • Read the book and pay attention. Why is the economy fucked up in Watchmen? Y'know how when Hollis Mason talks about his plants to open a garage and Manhattan is all "Well, you're going to have to learn how these new cars work because all the skills you've spent your life developing are pretty much useless"? I'd say making large swaths of the workforce obsolete would have something to do with it, actually speeding up the rate of unemployment and worker obsolescence.
    • 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 all—the book just said that Dr. Manhattan was able to manufacture enough lithium cells by magic to make cheap electric cars practicable. He's made a very efficient * battery* , in other words, but he hasn't invented an * energy source* . Electric cars still use up petroleum—they use it up more efficiently, through the power grid, but you still have to burn something to get the energy. And look up "Jevons' Paradox" on The Other Wiki; increased efficiency is never really a solution to an energy crisis. Unless we actually replace petroleum as a source of power, a more efficient use of petroleum will just lead us to * use more petroleum* . Flying cars are incredibly wasteful compared to ground-based transportation when it comes to energy consumption, but once the price of oil drops enough what was incredibly wasteful just becomes a relatively common luxury. The rate of consumption just keeps going up and up; consumer demand is an endlessly voracious black hole and technology can't solve that. Only legal regulation and social change can, and that's Mr. Amoral World Conqueror Ozymandias' department, not Dr. Manhattan's.
      • An unlimited supply of oil would most definitely not result in economic collapse; it would be the opposite—economic growth would proceed at a marvelous pace. One of the cost factors in the production and distribution of goods and services would be reduced to basically zero. In the real world, the cost of communication is being relentlessly driven down through the Internet and other technologies, but that is a net benefit to the world economy, because it frees up resources to be used for other purposes. The reason that the economy in Watchmen sucks so badly can be attributed to Nixon, who was a dedicated Keynesian, being in office for so long. He probably instituted all sorts of governmental policies that interfered with the production and distribution of goods and services. The economy is fucked up because God is on the side of supply, and there can be no demand. This is not basic economic theory, which clearly states that while resources are scarce, human wants (that is, demand) is unlimited. An unlimited supply of oil would be treated like air is in the real world. Other resources would presumably retain some level of scarcity, and so require some way to determine how they are distributed; with laissez-faire free markets and total government control being the opposite ends of the spectrum of methods to do this.
    • 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 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.)
    • You might as well ask Bruce Banner why gamma radiation gives him super strength and kills virtually anyone else. It's just a convention of the genre that weird shit can happen inside a nuclear reactor.
    • It's strongly implied, if not outright stated, that Osterman's meticulous personality helped him rebuild his body after it was disintegrated. That's one of the reasons why the comic emphasizes his past as a watchmaker. He had learned to take apart a clock and then reassemble it perfectly, and he had to do a similar job of reintegrating to his body, only it was a million times more difficult, since a human body obviously has a lot more parts than a watch. We can assume that, after your body has been disintegrated by the intrinsic field subtractor, whatever's left of your consciousness is in an extreme state of confusion, so managing to rebuild your body is an extremely difficult task. Even with Osterman, it took him months to do that. So the IFS probably was tested on other people, but they didn't manage to rebuild their bodies like Osterman did, so their consciousness just slowly dissolved into nothingness (or something like that). As for Bubastis, obviously an animal doesn't have the sort of mental faculty required to reintegrate one's body.

Continuity Issues And Fridge Logic (Book/Film)

  • When Manhattan says "there is no difference between life and death, they have the same amount of particles"? That is completely wrong. Live and dead bodies are very different, (decay, blood loss, microbiology, so many other fields in forensics can show this difference,) so it seems very stupid for him to claim "no difference between life and death." Any ideas for an explanation of this?
    • This Troper took it to mean that at the moment of death, there was little difference. Of course, afterwards there are many differences such as those listed....
    • No defining line. "Dead now? Nope." Nanosecond later: "Dead now? Nope." Nanosecond later: "Dead now? Nope." A few billion nanoseconds later: "Dead now? No- Um... Maybe? He's been dead for a little while? when did that happen? I guess there isn't really a difference, everything's still pretty much there. Nothing left or anything." Only, you know, in Manhattan-think.
    • I blame it on Alan Moore. Alan Moore doesn't understand science. In this scene, Dr. Manhattan is basically being a Straw Vulcan: he's a caricature of a logical thinker. The difference between a live and dead person supposedly can't be explained scientifically, a Straw Vulcan can't comprehend it. Of course this is still straw; a real logical thinker can recognize a difference even if he can't fully analyze it, and he would use a level of abstraction that's most useful for understanding, rather than reducing everything to atoms and molecules. It would be like a real scientist reading a scientific journal and complaining that the journal is meaningless because it's made of the same kind of carbon atoms as all other journals.
      • It was really a philosophical point, not a scientific one; Dr. Manhattan is essentially espousing a nihilist form of materialism which denies the existence of conciousness as anything more than a prolonged series of physical reactions, lacking in any objective value. He understands the differences between a living and dead body, he just denies that they matter. It is only when he comes to appreciate consciousness as a unique subjective experience that he changes his mind. It is essentially Moore suggesting that nothing in the universe has objective value, but that this does not prevent us from seeking and finding subjective value.
    • What made his argument especially silly is that Dr. Manhattan himself is perhaps the ultimate example of how life animating a set of particles makes a huge difference. When Osterman's body was destroyed, his mere consciousness built himself a new body from the scratch. What more proof do you need for the fact that life controlling certain particles makes the result very different from those particles being "dead"? The realization he came to when observing Laurie's life should've been obvious if he'd merely considered his own miraculous rebirth as Dr. Manhattan.
      • That simply reflects the ability of a consciousness to manipulate matter, it does not lend such manipulation any value, which what he was really commenting on. From a nihilistic point of view, why is the spontaneous generation of a body more important or unusual than anything else that happens?
    • Personally, I just figured that Osterman was a physicist, so Dr. Manhattan wasn't accustomed to thinking about things from a life-sciences perspective, rather than physical-sciences. If not for that bias, he would've caught on to the phenomenal improbability inherent in conception, ages ago. As it was, he notices that the atoms of a human body aren't any different after death than before it, and dismisses the umpteen-trillion changes that crop up at the chemical and higher levels as trivial due to his rparticle-physicist reductionism.
  • How does Rorschach see through his mask?
    • Hrmm...
    • Light can penetrate it to his eyes. However, only a very tiny amount of light that penetrates it will be reflected back out to the eyes of anybody looking at him. It's the same reason that, if you stand outside on a dark night and look through a window into a brightly-lit room, you can see what's happening in the room, but somebody in the rom can't see you unless they press their face to the glass.
    • The same way you can see through a black sock pulled over your eyes.
    • Once a week or so he coated the inside of his mouth with a paste made up of lard, pig fat, and Twinkie filling. He had also cauterized the salival glands inside his mouth. Every time he went "hrm" his diaphragm/lungs would release moist air at body temperature which interacts with the paste, creating a mixture of air and pure fat. The fat air dispersed up and through his facial mask and would allow him to see.
  • Hollis "Nite Owl I" Mason's autobiography is shown in one panel to be a two-volume hardcover. However, the fifteen pages of "excerpts" included in the graphic novel cover everything from his boyhood to his retirement. Either those excerpts were seriously abridged, or Mason had the very large print edition....
    • The bulk of it was probably anecdotes going into the details of individual cases or other incidents.
  • How does Rorschach survive? This isn't even talking about his ability to overpower better armed crooks who are a lot bigger than him - he carries his "The end is nigh" sign all day and beats up criminals all night - wouldn't he die from the fatigue? And if he's a crazy man carrying a sign, how does he make a living? He pays rent in an apartment, after all.
    • He probably doesn't hold his sign all day long - only when people are coming off work. As for how he pays the rent/makes a living, I'm pretty sure I remember him emptying the pockets of the crooks he kills. And of course, whenever he visits his "friends", he mooches off of them (e.g. Nite Owl's sugar cubes, the contents of Moloch's fridge).
    • 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 Roschach's mask (and by extension the dress) are heat and pressure sensitive, then why do they always form a perfect mirror image down the middle?
    • 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.
    • This has been tested by various fan-made Rorschach masks using heat-sensitive invisible ink and found to be more or less accurate. Unfortunately, invisible ink always takes the same overall shape, so it's not the same effect; a hippie-light or mood ring might be a better example.
    • Actually it's specifically pointed out that the material uses quantum phlebotinum to maintain symmetry or some such nonsense.
  • Rorschach ambushed Moloch by hiding in his refrigerator. To do so, he had to leave the funeral early, break into Moloch's home, remove food and shelves from the fridge, hide them somewhere, and then climb in and wait. What if Moloch decided to pick up some groceries or something on his way home? Or if he came in the door and just climbed the stairs and went to bed? It was a little presumptuous of Rorschach to assume that Moloch would definitely walk near to the fridge.
    • Ironically, all of the above is Fridge Logic.
    • I'm sure that if Moloch had gone straight to bed, Rorschach would have heard, and gone and assaulted him in bed. If he'd picked up groceries, he would just drop them in surprise when ambushed.
      • How would he get out of the fridge?
      • It's Rorschach. He'd probably use that little technique known as "being strong enough to shatter a sink with one kick".
    • Short answer: Rorschach is crazy and has too much time on his hands.
    • The real question is how did he intend on breathing? Sure, he might have been able to handle the cold, but there still wouldn't be a lot of air in there.
      • If the air started going bad, he could just open the door and breathe for a minute or two. He'd still (probably) hear Moloch fiddling with the door and be able to ambush him.
        • His mask is made of two layers of latex. He's essentially got two condoms pulled over his head at a time. Theres no logic in how he manages to even see, let alone breath.
    • Less-short answer: Rorschach doesn't need to wait in the fridge the whole time, he can get in when Moloch comes home. Rorschach had investigated Moloch for years, so it's reasonable he'd know his habits.
      • For that matter, he'd looked through the medicine cabinet, so might've found some pills that had to be taken with food at bedtime. That would guarantee Moloch's visit to the fridge.
  • What was Moloch doing with a can of hairspray in his apartment anyway? Seen his hair?
    • As related on this page already, it might have been for the funeral roses. Hairspray preserves cut flowers. Besides, it might not have been hairspray - that's hardly the only flammable hygiene product in existence.
      • It has the words "Veid- Fo- Me- Hai- Spr-" on chapter 5, page 25, panel 6. The funeral roses explanation seems most likely.
    • It was the 1980s, before spray can deoderants were banned due to the CF Cs they contained. It was Moloch's deodorant.
      • As stated above, it's probably Hair Spray.
      • Spray can deodorants are still commercially available; just not CFC-based ones.
    • Okay, so he doesn't have MUCH hair, but he still styled it. I've seen that hairstyle on my Dad for years, and he still has his hair.
      • Moloch is a cancer patient. He probably did have plenty of hair when he bought the spray can, before starting chemotherapy.
  • Also, what was with the funeral? British-style pallbearers? Not folding the flag into a triangle shape? Huh? (And don't get me started on Nixon's "nuclear football.")
    • Did Not Do the Research, maybe. Or somebody figured nobody'd care.
      • 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 different—some as a result of Dr. Manhattan, and some gratuitously so. The nuclear football is a bit of a groaner, but it makes for quick visual shorthand.
      • 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 Rorshach break the goon's fingers and pin him to the cell door? I've bent my arms like that and, granted, I'm more flexible than most, but even my dad can twist his arms that far without pain. And why do they have to kill him to get to the door?
    • 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 . . . "
    • They have to kill him because any attempts to untie the hapless goon's arms would just result in Rorschach doing something horrible to /their/ hands as well.
      • It still doesn't make sense for them to have to kill the guy. If they were gonna cut the door open anyway, the guy with his hands tied could have just... you know... stood as much out of the way as possible. By killing him, they had a big, fat, limp corpse in the way.
        • I found it odd that they didn't just cut his hands off, or something.
          • In the movie, they did.
        • They're gangsters. They didn't have to kill him, but why not? Go sadism.
      • Just to clarify a point that I think some people have spotted but others haven't- the fat criminal's hands were tied with some of Rorschach's clothes. It's a bit difficult to move your arm through a solid metal bar...
  • 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 pathalogically attached to his "face" and can't bear to have it removed involuntarily (see Rorschach's arrest at the end of Chapter 5), so pulling his mask askew is an effective fight move against Rorschach as he will be compelled to stop fighting and put the mask back on.
  • 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.
    • Rule of Cool and Rule of Drama. It was more entertaining that way instead of doing the practical thing of ransacking the place or reading the labels.
    • Well, they were actually in a box under a load of other boxes. Besides, you don't know how long he was in there for. It's entirely possible he broke in, tore through a few of them, got frustrated (and he's probably not thinking particularly straight at that moment, considering) then noticed the doctor coming in and decided to a) find his face quickly and b) scare the piss out of Doctor Long.
  • Why does movie Moloch have hairspray in his house? The man is bald.
    • Maybe he bought it for the funeral. Hairspray preserves cut flowers.
    • Or maybe the hairspray was left over from before his cancer diagnosis. The guy could've been bald due to chemotherapy, not his age.
      • And even if it was baldness due to age, he just might not have bothered to throw it out.
    • No he wasn't. Moloch had hair
  • Rorshach said his mask is made of latex, which is airtight. How the hell does he breathe when he wears that thing?
    • He was wrong.
      • He never specifically said it was Latex, if I remember correctly, it was something Doc Manhattan whipped up for Kitty Genovese that just happened to respond the same way to heated scissors...
        • Crap, just reread that sequence last night, it actually did specify the dress was latex.
        • Perhaps it was latex nanotubules with the ink inside.
    • He doesn't.
  • Rorshach routinely wears gloves. So, okay, Veidt shoots... Moloch, and Rorshach walks right into the trap set up for him. But, what evidence would the cops have that Rorshach shot Moloch? Or are they just arresting him because of his years upon years of vigilanteism?
    • If you find a a known vigilante with a history of going too far in the same room as a recently murdered crook, what are you going to assume?
    • He's an outlaw vigilante who just set a cop on fire. That's more than enough to hold him, at least as long as shown in the film.
    • He was already wanted for two counts of Murder One. They didn't need Moloch to get him to prison; they might be holding him on the man he burned to death when he snapped, or Captain Carnage, or another killing we don't know about.
    • In the extra notes just after Rorschach gets caught, there's a police report about his capture. There's a line in it that says there were no finger prints on the gun, as expected since Rorschach wears gloves.
  • Doctor Manhattan became who and what he is when his intrinsic field was subtracted. At the end of the film, fifteen million people had their fields subtracted. Granted, Osterman was an extraordinary man in terms of intellect, education, and force of will, but what if just one of those fifteen million people was equally exceptional? What if more than one was?
    • Different thing altogether. The experiment Dr. Manhattan was involved with was dismantling the object particle by particle. In the movie, it was just a powerful explosion, similar to an A-bomb - if no, there wouldn't have been any rubble left, just a big-ass hole.
      • Also, Jon Osterman had a very unique history. He was a nuclear physicist whose dream was to become a watchmaker. Not many of those around, not even in New York. He also had a watch with him. And he was played by sexy, sexy, Billy Crudup.
        • Recall the quote from Albert Einstein in the book which very clearly influenced Osterman's early bio: "The problem lies in the heart of men. If I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
  • It only just hit me last night, but doesn't the change in Silk Spectre II's costume from the book to the film (silk nighty to latex body suit) render her name a complete misnomer?
    • Didn't Silk Spectre I explained her new reasoning behind the name in that 60 minutes expy they released? Something about the name being exotic and though.
    • She probably did wear silk for photo shoots. Remember that she became a masked heroine to promote her acting career.
  • Why, oh why did they write out all of the secondary characters? Bernie the News man is my favorite character in the entire book, and they wrote him out? WHY?!?!?!?
    • Because keeping them in would have added at least another fifteen minutes to what was already a very long movie. Something had to be cut, and as entertaining as Bernie and the others are, they are in no way essential to the main plot.
    • Don't worry, it's All There In The Limited Special Collectors' Ultimate Edition.
  • What's with the change in look? Why did they change the cars, fasions, etc, to look like The Eighties? I mean it seems they looked at the book and said "this isn't Eighties enough" and changed it so it looked more Retraux. This seems like they're missing the point, as it's not meant to be the "real" eighties, it's meant to show a completely different eighties that came about because of Dr. Manhattan.
    • The youth culture draws from Asia more beacuse Vietnam is now part of the country (The punk equivelent is the Knot tops). Crazy different technologies because Doc Manhattan and Viedt let all kinds of sixties Sci Fi technologies come in existence, affecting fashion, and the look of the cars, men where 1940s style suits because Manhattan wore a suit to his unveiling. None of this is like the "real" Eighties.
  • Why did they screw it up so badly? I mean they have a shot for shot storyboard in the book! The motion comic was better because it stayed true to the original cinematography.
    • 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 winners—was the "Unforgettable" commercial in the beginning one of them?
  • 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?
    • Probably just a continuity eror.
    • He knows what the expression means (he knows a lot of things!), but sometimes chooses to question it and other times just uses it as an idiom.
  • How can a tachyon stream blind Dr. Manhattan to the future when he experiences all times simultaneously?
    • In the same way a snowstorm blinds you to what you are currently experiencing in this present moment. He foresaw his lack of foresight due to the tachyons, because he was experiencing it then and there in the future.
    • The exact effect of the tachyons seems to be to temporally dislocate Manhattan, making him confused about which moment in time is which, as suggested when he repeats what he said to Laurie to Rorschach "forty-five seconds ago." "It's these tachyons..."
  • The above answer perhaps (but perhaps not?) solves the problem that has Just Bugged Me more than ANYTHING else about Watchmen: why Manhattan was surprised to learn Janey had cancer, and tells her "I didn't know".
    • Manhattan has to react on a set fate, regardless of how he feels about it. His dialogue, actions, you name it, are all scripted, the same as everybody else (in Watchmen, not necessarily reality). The only difference is he is that he "sees the strings." So he knows all that has, is, and will happen to him, but he still has to act chronologically. He can't change his present to compensate for what he knows will come. It's like he's riding a roller-coaster. He can see everything ahead of him, but he's stuck on that track whether he likes it or not.
      • Yup. It's even more explicit when he and Silk Spectre II have a conversation about her love life. Manhattan basically says "You're about to tell me you and Dan are sleeping together" ... and then, when she does imply it, he asks, as if he doesn't know, "You mean you and Dan are sleeping together?"
  • The oft-repeated claim that the movie renamed the Crime Busters to the Watchmen. Maybe I'm missing something (and I haven't seen the extended version so this may be it), but the group never seemed to be given any name at all in the film. The word "Watchmen" came up a few times, but it always seemed to be referring to superheroes in general rather than any particular group, in a similar way to the "Who watches the watchmen?" graffiti. In particular, Hollis Mason was referred to as a watchman at least once, despite never being in the Crime Busters.
    • In the title sequence, "WATCHMEN" comes up right as they are showing the Minutemen group photo. If someone wasn't familiar with the source material, it might be easy to miss the banner behind them and conclude the group itself was called the Watchmen.
  • Ozy catches the bullet. Totally cool thing to do. But he still get hurt and bleeds. In the film he has armor on his hands that stops the bullet so he doesn't get hurt. Except, if he had armor on his hands that could stop the bullet then why not just let the bullet hit him in the chest where he has even more armor?
    • The bullet does hurt his hand. He has to yank it out and it's noticeably bloodied. Armor on the chest doesn't mean it's perfect, and while it may stop the bullet, it's still going to hurt like hell. Also, she wasn't aiming for his chest; watch where his hand moves, it's level with his head.
  • The murder of Hollis Mason doesn't make sense. The Knot Tops went after him because Nite-Owl broke Rorschach out of prison, but why would they assume it was Mason and not the second Nite-Owl, whose existence was well known by the time Mason's book came out?
    • They're obviously not very bright. Their logic goes thus: Rorschach hospitalized one Knot Top's cousin --> A Nite-Owl worked with Rorschach and may have been involved --> This guy who was Nite-Owl wrote a book --> We know where to find him Nite-Owl, and not Rorschach. The comic book has the additional detail that their ringleader is very drunk.
  • Dr. Jon Ostrander was a remarkable man, even an extraordinary one. But several millions of people have just died in the exact same way as he did, and in places where people similar to Dr. Ostrander congregate. Is there any reason to think that none of them would be able to reassemble themselves after having their intrinsic fields subtracted?
    • Osterman used to work with watches when he was a child. He knows how to put things apart and pull the little parts back together, he has the skill and patience of a watchmaker. the watch sequence was there to underline this. And, as for whether some watchmakers would be able to pull that off, too, Osterman was ALSO a brilliant physicist, and he was able to apply his Watchmaking skills to subatomic particles, while most of the watchmakers are not.


Boys

Disclaimer: TV Tropes.org is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Veidt International Enterprises. All inquiries should be directed to Veidt Headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. Revenue growth for the third quarter remain strong thanks to an increased popular interest in memes driven by the declining threat of global annihilation. Note to Self:: TV Tropes may be a good subsidiary to finance my sequel plot, titled simply Boys. The Boys from Brazil? More study is needed. --Veidt

  • And an idea for new security software that DOESN'T tell you that the password you typed is correct, but incomplete? So that, you know, you can't type in one letter, trying each possible one untill you guess the first letter right, which will be listed as 'incomplete', then repeat the process for the second letter, then the 3rd, etc.
  • 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?
    • Well, I figure it's this: Veidt's confidence and self-love is pretty much a front. Personally he is filled with self-doubt and guilt about his plan. This explains his dreams - in which he expresses his greatest fear, that he is wrong about his actions. So when he's shouting 'YES!', he's also doing it to sooth his own self-recrimination. What Veidt most seeks is justification, for people he respects, who are not merely loyal yes men, who are indeed his enemies, to agree with him and tell him that 'yes, you did the right thing'. For that purpose, he 'invited' these people there. And made sure that they were not judging under duress. He tried to kill Dr Manhattan because Dr Manhattan had an immediate ability to undo anything he does, while he would let Rorschach leave because in some senses, he was his friend, and because he thinks he can control any damage Rorschach does.
    • He kills his assistants because they could have undone his work by warning the world it was coming. By the time he explains himself to Nite Owl and Rorshach, he's already accomplished his plan (thirty five minutes earlier). He baited them out of New York because he cares for them as friends, after all Nite Owl's first act after hearing the "mask killer" theory was to try to warn Ozymandias. He allows Rorshach to leave because, even assuming he survives the trip back to the flying craft and the flight back to civilization, he's a pre-discredited loony. As for Manhattan, Ozy needed to talk to him but Manhattan wouldn't listen initially, having just come from the disaster site with Spectre. So Ozy tried to kill him.
    • This troper always felt that Ozy wasn't trying to kill Doc Man, but just slow him down.

Timeline Quandaries

  • What did Laurie do while Jon was out conquering Vietnam? They met before Jon was drafted into the war, but no mention of what she was doing durring that time.
    • Jon probably only joined the war effort (as it were) after Nixon became president. Once Doctor Manhattan got involved, it was probably a really quick war.
      • It was. In the comic Manhattan says he's been in Vietnam for two months and the Viet Cong are expected to surrender within the week.
    • And bear in mind Osterman can be in more than one place at the same time. What did Laurie do while Jon was out conquering Vietnam? Probably Jon.

Real World Cold War versus Watchmen

  • At the time this was written was this a more optimistic world ultimately than our own? It was written when Glasnost was just really getting going, but many still saw no way out. Was this Alan Moore's cynical way out? How much of this is just his own prejudice showing through? Especially with Nixon and USSR relations? Or instead of being a dystopian alterantive history as we'd now see it, is it a mixed bag alternative history where peace prevails and we've got clean technology.
    • Well, our world thankfully turned out to be more optimistic. Word of God has it that Watchmen was meant to be anti-Reagan, but he used Nixon because "you're not going to get much argument that Nixon was scum". It was satire on the way many powerful people at the time seemed to believe that America was indestructible and had nothing to fear from the USSR's nukes.
      • We're polluting the planet, causing climate change. We're wiping out rainforests and species for money. Big business controls the American government. We're overpopulating, now we're up to 7 billion people. Our news is all You Can Panic Now New Media Are Evil Moral Guardians. The RIAA can sue Limewire for 7 trillion and not instantly have their case thrown out. People can lose tens of thousands of dollars if a company decides to make them an example for pirating. Companies treat customers like criminals. The US is at what, four wars now? We're living in an optimistic world.
        • Interestingly, it's the Comedian who notes that if the US had lost in Vietnam, it would have driven the States a bit insane as a country. Draw from that what you will.
        • Heh, I remember reading that in the 1980s some joints in Vegas were taking bets as to when the USSR/US would nuke each other. All those problems mentioned in the above post (with possible exception of climate change) are surmountable if US citizens would actually take a stand, but legalizing pot and arguing over who is more American than the next guy (birthers...) takes priority. Nuclear annihilation was a very real fear in the Cold War, especially the 80s. I mean, come on, If that had happened, none of the aforementioned societal problems would even exist.

Captain Metropolis's death

  • I keep reading in some places e.g. The Other Wiki, that Captain Metropolis's car crash decapitation was actually suicide. I've read over the graphic novel several times but I can't seem to get this piece of info anywhere. Could anyone point to where it might be?
    • Actually, from what I've heard the leading theory isn't that it was a suicide, but a faked death.

Atomic Crisis?

  • I know that in the book everyone believes that World War 3 and the Armageddon is inevitable, but all of the newspaper sources are distinctly biased, along with most characters. Would the USSR really commit to suicide in order to bomb out the USA? What about the other way around? It seems unlikely that either side would bring out the big guns, in realization of what pressing the button would do, especially one more war over East vs West government in another country.
    • I see someone missed the scenes where Nixon is in a planning meeting for a first strike on the USSR, considering losing the east coast acceptable losses.
    • One of the intermission pieces in the novel tries to explain the Soviet psychology in the Watchmen world, which basically boils down to: given they spilled more blood than the Allies did in World War Two, and they were subject to destruction on their own home soil, Dr. Manhattan's presence and powers compels a death-wish psychology in them given that since they cannot prevail, they will die trying. By default, if one side launches its' nukes, the other does as well. Also bear in mind how this is borne out in real events: literally the moment Dr. Manhattan leaves for Mars, Russia invades Afghanistan.
    • Bear in mind that it's not a universal "explanation" about "Soviet psychology", it's an assumption by an (American) author of the intermission. In the end he just sees the Soviet people (and, I presume, the leaders of the Union) as "those wacky commies" with some suicidal inhuman ideas. But, yes, the WW 2 greatly influenced the mindset of Soviet people about the theoretical WW 3 - that is, they never wanted such a destructive world conflict to ever happen again (IRL Soviet people were very scared of an idea of a nuke apocalypse - to the point when "I wish there would be no more wars" was a usual wish for any person). In fact, we never actually SEE the perception of the crysis by Soviet people or by the government of USSR in the comic book.

Create new thread / Unsorted

If it doesn't fit one of the aforementioned folders, create your own.

  • I read somewhere that Ozymandias' parents were Nazis. Were they scientists who genetically engineered Veidt into the perfect human genius that he is, or am I reading too much into this?
    • Where did you hear this? There's nothing in either book or movie that implies anything of the sort.
  • Ok, the original heroes were cops, right? Well then, how were there female heroes? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think women were on the police force back then.
    • Not all of the original heroes were cops. In fact, the first Nite-Owl is the only one we know is identified as a police officer.
      • Oh, ok.
  • The Roche case. If Grice was a small-time guy with no gang connections or any other connections, how would breaking 15 guys' arms lead Rorschach to him? Maybe Grice was an idiot who went and bragged to his lowlife buddies, but "break some random guys' fingers and hope they know something" doesn't seem like a logical strategy. Rorschach is described as "tactically brilliant", he should have come up with something better than that.
    • Since the girl was kidnapped because Grice thought she was the daughter of a wealthy couple, he was obvious he would need some means of ransoming her. So Rorshach probably went to every lowlife he could think of that would know about that sort of stuff. Really, he had no other means of tracking her, so he decided to play the odds and see if he found anything.
  • About a minute into the film, when the body falls god knows many stories from an apartment building. My first thought was, why the heck was the smiley-face button totally unscathed after hitting the ground? The edge should have been puckered, the metal bent, at the very LEAST there should have been a dent in the side of it similar to what happens to the edge of a bar of soap when you drop it in the shower. What gives (or in this case, doesn't?)
    • Mass. A button like that has very little of it, and thus very little force behind it when it falls, or is thrown. It's simply not going to fall with the kind of force that's going to do any real damage to it. It'd have to be going at a ridiculous speed for it to be deformed, which isn't going to happen from just a fall because it's not at all aerodynamic.
  • Does anyone else think that in the movie, Rorschach decided too quickly to share his backstory with the psychiatrist?
    He starts out lying about the inkblots and probably thinking something like, "Got some secrets. Won't ever tell you," then a few minutes later he's like, "Okay, I suddenly feel like telling you all the details of my descents into insanity."
    • The difference is that in the book, the psychiatrist buys his lies about the inkblots, and it's only later on that he catches on and talks Rorschach into telling him the real story. In the movie, he recognizes that Rorschach's bullshitting him right away, so they skip right to the backstory. Call it a product of having to compress the storyline for a movie.
  • 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 anything—he doesn't even wear it in Vietnam. Neither of the Silk Spectres actually wear masks. How is it that Veidt and Mason are the only ones whose identities are public? Rorschach has to do detective work just to figure out the Comedian's actual identity!
    • 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.
  • Why is it spelled N-I-T-E Owl, not N-I-G-H-T Owl?
    • Because poor literacy is KEWL
  • Two things of the movie I've read here;

1) Were audiences that concerned about if Doc Manhattan was circumcised or not? Why?

    • Because people pick really, really stupid things to worry about.

2) No smoking for Laurie? If they have prolonged sex scenes in a film I don't think smoking is that big a deal

    • As I understand it, Laurie didn't smoke because the actress didn't want to smoke.

I'm going to bed now. Night night.

    • ... is this troper the only one who read that as a comment from Veidt? Oh my.
      • Ha! I went to bed thirty five minutes ago!
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