Watchmen

Just finished reading Watchmen for the first time, checked it out on a whim after seeing it in my local library, and I'm still trying to come to grips with it all. I don't really have any questions about it yet, but does anybody else feel like talking about it? Before Watchmen and the movie are optional.

Well, I don't know what kind of answers you're seeking, and I'll try to cover them all.

Emotionally it's a very strong story with so many different characters it's inevitable to relate to at least one of them, you see them come to grips with their reality or staunchly reject it and make something better out of it, so almost anyone can get something out of reading it.

It's indeed a very good story, the fear of god, death, doom, the feeling of powerlessness, and the comfiness in saying "I can't do anything about it" are very present, the plot makes you think a bit HOWEVER I think the story is so constrained, and well executed that anyone who reads it and thinks about it comes invariably to the same thought.

And if you want to talk about the characters themselves, I think everyone was to some extent "right" about what they were doing, except for Rorschach, after reading a lot of Miller and Watchmen you really notice the power of a narrator that gives you what to think, if you remove his thought bubbles on Rorschach he comes out as a psycho that nobody would take seriously, so the journal he left would only humour conspiracy theorists, in the end he commited suicide by Manhattan cause he just couldn't live with himself being not only wrong, but accepting his own crimes.

i sometimes wonder if watchmen did more damage than good to the industry.

I guess I can agree with most of this.

Thinking the book over the only noticeable complaint I have at the moment is how the climax was supposed to work. Considering how grounded most of the Watchmen's characters are, having an actual psychic seems a bit too far-fetched.

psychic? are you referring to dr.Manhattan?

No, the psychic whose brain was used for the creature.

ahh ok sorry its been awhile since i've dusted off the off the old watchmen. yeah i can see where your coming from in that regard, while i am not a fan of the movie i can see why they replaced the creature concept in the movie.

In my reviewing this info about an apparent psychic in the watchmen universe, I looked at the article for the squid itself on the dc wiki, and it says that it was the culmination of Veidt's long run of subliminal suggestions in the form of the Nostalgia personal care line and Utopia's many Sci-Fi Monster Movies.
The fact that these things I initially thought were just worldbuilding actually have a place in the plot spurns me on to consider other inconsequential things.
Namely, what was the point of the Top Knot gangs and the band Pale Horse, aside from The Death of Nite Owl I.

shoot in the dark but i think the gang attacks are just another way moore grounds the heroes to reality.

>except for Rorschach
Rorschach wasn't just right, he was the only actual hero in the book.
And no I'm not some edgy teenager going to tell you true vigilantism only works when taken to it's ultimate extreme. The more I read watchman and the older I've gotten I have come to believe watchmen was a destruction of the cape genre not in that it attempted to put real people in a cape and show real consequences of doing so but in that it did it just to show how ridiculous the very idea of costumed vigilantes is.
The only person, the only fucking person who put any kind of code of honor or personal morality above the end justifying the means was the deranged hobo. It's not suicide by Manhattan, that implies he gave up or somehow accepted the view point of ozzy as being correct. He just thought death preferable to breaking his own ideology, the exact same attitude that lead to the cold war in the first place.
Never compromise, not even in the face of Armageddon. Rorschach is Moore's ultimate fuck you to capeshit.

and in time the way people viewed rorschach became the ultimate fuck you to moore.

How funny, I re-read the book yesterday too.

Gotta say the movie was MUCH better. A lot of the retardedness and pacing of the book was much better in the movie.
For example, the Dr. Manhattan getting rid of the reporters and fleeing to Mars scene.
> Movie: Ditch reporters, next time we see him, he's on mars.
> Book: Ditch reporters, go home tell people he's leaving, go to the desert and grab a picture, THEN go to Mars.

Or the rape scene with Comedian and Jupiter.
>Book: Lots of weird dialogue, even afterwards where the other heroes like... talk to him.
>Movie: Hooded dude just beats the crap out of him.

I mean, there were some things the book did better, but the constant black freighter cuts wasn't one of them. Or the retarded random alien ending. Or the pacing.
Really about the only thing the book did better was little bits of added dialogue that helped with world building.

Also, Manhattans sequence in the movies was probably the best moment in a super hero movie ever.

What's wrong with the pacing of the comic?

I didn't see it too far-fetched, Veidt was already trying to improve manking with suppemental and hormonal enhancement through his products like food or something, that's partly how he achieved beyond human skills, he was using his own products and he could get medical attention to prevent his own overdose, so getting a psychic and enhancing it was, actually, rather verosimile.

>He just thought death preferable to breaking his own ideology, the exact same attitude that lead to the cold war in the first place.
That makes him wrong in the first place, the rest were at least willing to compromise for the sake of peace, however shortlived it is, thing is every character had a reason to think the way they did, except for Rorschach.

Comedian realized humans were violent, so embraced violence and left morality behind by giving in to his own urges.
Ozymandias realized humans were violent, so he embraced this violence by giving people a target to directed, but he also left morality behind.
Nite Owl didn't accept that humanity was violent, he himself was violent in the first place but he didn't want to change the world, or change his morals, so he deluded himself thinking nighttime vigilantism would solve everything.
Silk Spectre was forced into a life she didn't want, compared to Nite Owl choosing it, and she too left her frustration out through violence.
Rorschach didn't accept people as violent, but he was violent himself, he didn't think there was any grey area in morality either, he couldn't accept being wrong, and he couldn't accept that people lived different lives to him, that's why he treats his fellow vigilantes so badly, that's why he chose death, and that why he, out of spite, left the journal; surely he realized Ozy was about to bring world peace thus proving himself right, but if Ozy was right, Rorschach couldn't have been.

Only Rorschach was wrong in the entire comic.

I never did understand the random-ass alien at the end. It just seems easier to frame the glowing humanioid demigod like in the film.

I understood it. It was just stupid.
The idea that some random dead alien from another dimension would unit the world was silly.
Not to mention Ozy was commissioning painters to make pictures of it.

The whole thing was just weird.

Unless that info's from his Before Watchmen series, I don't remember Veidt saying anything like that was part of how he got to where he was. I just assumed the superhuman physique was part of his Alexander RP, and he was already more worldly than the other adventurers, so it'd make sense that he had stuff they didn't know how to deal with.

It's not from Before Watchmen, but he is the richest man in the world and he says himself he has many research going on genetics hence Bubastis and his garden, I recall him he has many different properties in different areas, so I'd assume he has TV stations, electronic, pharmaceutics, energetics...

I do remember him saying, in the original novel, he tried improving mankind himself but didn't really matter a lot.

Now go read Pax Americana.

>Rorschach
>Wrong

You'll see when you get a bit older kids, just how "wrong" he was.
The way this world is headed, Rorschach will be proven as right all along.

How can one person be so retarded and wrong?

Is pinning it on Dr. Manhattan really that much of an improvement? I think it makes less sense than the alien since he was an American asset, I doubt all the other nations are just going to completely ignore that even if Ozy destroyed some American cities too. He's not exactly a threat that would unite the world against it like an alien invasion. The book also went into some pretty in-depth explanation for the alien. The way it was made was reminiscent of the Argo film used in the Iran Hostage crisis. Ozy created a threat that held no ties to any known faction or nation and made it so that it imprinted on the minds of almost everyone in the world. He even used his various companies to foster the "us vs. them" mentality against this fictional alien threat and create a new culture of globalism. It even tied into the Tales of the Black Freighter with the writer. I can understand why they changed this for the movie since by its very nature its a very intricate and complicated conspiracy that would not necessarily translate very well to film. However, to say that the movie's plot is an improvement over the comic is just plain retarded.

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