Why does 90% of the comic community and Moore himself think that this guy is supposed to be horrible and unsympathetic...

Why does 90% of the comic community and Moore himself think that this guy is supposed to be horrible and unsympathetic? Genuinely curious. He's by far the most human character in the entire story (besides Hollis) and the only one who actually cares about crimefighting because it's the right thing to do.

He's an autistic hobo possible homosexual.

Because he's one of those characters who has a reputation for attracting edgelords and screeching autists. No one wants to be that guy who says their favorite character is Rorschach because he's the most sympathetic one because they don't want to be misconstrued as meaning that they sympathize with his politics, world view, etc. Much easier to give the generic "he's my favorite because he's so complex and messed up" answer everyone falls back on.

Plus, Lord Alan seems to think he's a Nazi, so of course you're going to have people who parrot him no matter what because it's his character.

>most human character
>who is Dan
>who is Laurie

Because he is mentally unstable, apart from being a moore representation of an ultra right patriot, he is not a bad character at all. But his form of vigilantism and of living is very insane.

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You might want to start questioning your own morality when you see Rorschach as a reasonable, admirable human being.

I wanted to give Moore the benefit of the doubt by assuming Dan and Laurie are meant to satirize the self-absorbed, all-about-me nature everyone had in the 80s, but apparently he intended for them to be the most sympathetic of the bunch. I'm starting to wonder if he even knows his own characters.

Because he lets his opinions get the better of his judgement.

>You might want to start questioning your own morality when you see Rorschach as a reasonable, admirable human being.
>saying that someone is human and sympathetic is the same as saying they're admirable and reasonable
Okay?

>Moore was able to write a character whose views are antithetical to his own.
Like JMS he has the intellectual curiosity to explore other viewpoints without pushing his own views.

> Most of today's comics writers are incapable of doing this. They can only write to their own agenda, not explore a different viewpoint and seek to understand it.

Fuck guys, I just really like his designt.

It is though.

> Moore foresaw segways.

No, it really isn't. Saying that someone has moments of humanity that make them very sympathetic and pitiable isn't the same as saying "I agree with everything this person does".

Moore can't write women.

What if I'm like the character irl.

Because Rorschach really does embody some of the worst things about superheroes as a concept. Ultimately it must be admitted that fantasies wherein one dons a disguise and visits severe pain and violence upon those who you have determined to be harmful to the social order is, surprise surprise, kinda morally suspect. And as far as moral issues arising from this scenario, Rorschach just does everything wrong.
The justice system fails to rehabilitate violent offenders? Rorschach says kill em.
The cops try to nail you for dispensing your own brand of lethal justice?
Rorschach says set 'em on fire.
Some harmless weirdo in a costume is hassling you personally?
Rorschach says drop him down an elevator shaft.

The issue is that for the same reason that people like The Punisher, people like seeing Rorschach do these things. It could be argued that the whole reason people enjoy cape comics is because the inconvenient realities of these moral dilemmas are glossed over. Thus, you get a character whom the writer intended as a criticism and the readers love.

>literally Terry Davis in comic form

He's pretty sympathetic. Mentally ill =/= immoral

>this guy is supposed to be horrible and unsympathetic
It is. That is the point of his character. that doesn't mean he can't be an interesting character.

it's actual bandwagoning. moore said some shit (because he talks shit constantly) which retards took and ran even further with.

he is absolutely supposed to be an enormously sympathetic character, as 'the one true hero'. the fact that, in order to be that person, he also had to be totally insane in every conventional way, is his tragedy.

You didn't like silk spectre? She's a well developed Dinah

It is difficult to do so, After watchmen moore with other works I let myself be carried away by many of its liberal areas. Not for nothing watchmen is the masterpiece that is, It gives the best partial understanding of all political points of view

He's supposed to be horrible AND sympathetic.
The issue people have is people whitewash his obvious flaws and generally being a horrible human being and see him as wholly heroic.

Slick is a very good character objectively speaking, but what is good is a very different thing. Something like diane of bojack horseman

People only think fondly of this book because it was their first. There's a lot of characters that don't exist other than to take up space: silk spectre II, nite owl II, the comedian, etc

>man was horrifically physically (and possibly even sexually) abused throughout his entire childhood
>copes with his trauma by turning to crimefighting
>cares so much about failing to save a child from dying a horrible death that it literally drives him insane
>psychotic as he is, he still cares about doing the right thing and has moments of genuine affection for his one friend and is capable of recognizing when he's wrong (scenes with Dan, scene with his landlady and her kids, etc.)
>but fuck that, he's still horrible and you're not meant to like him
I just don't get this meme.

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>Why does 90% of the comic community
Pretty sure he always comes up as number one in Watchmen popularity polls. Only people I've seen online who don't like him are Moore who says a lot of strange things and briefly some people trying to bash Ted Cruz for saying he liked the character a couple years ago

She has no real role in the story past being someone's cocksleeve or an accessory to get them to do something that affects the story. Laurie does very little on her own to move the plot along and doesn't really have a personality past being bitchy and passive aggressive.

I'm not a tumblr feminist by any means, but I can totally understand why people point fingers at her as an example of a sexist or poorly written female character.

He thinks if you give up crimefighting because you're basically old then you're not "healthy of mind" for one. Also his account of sex because of his mother.

Unsympathetic, I don't think he necessarily is. As a matter of fact I think Moore didn't account for his popularity with the fact that Watchmen is already a pretty dark, oppressive book, so Rorschach is basically looking like the guy who's giving as good as he gets in such a rotten environment.

But when you start going through the story more times a lot of Rorschach's issues really begin to boil to the surface. At least in my experience.

I'll never kill dogs because my mother was a whore.

Fuck him. Between him and the literal god, he was the one who was more of a danger to mankind.

He's also mentally ill. you're not

He's an insane homeless vigilante. He's more sympathetic and admirable than Moore would admit but he's still kinda horrible and I wouldn't describe his crazy view of the world as the right thing to do nor would I call him the most human, whatever that means.

nah, moore is the least sexist person there can be, he is too much liberal

>rape in literally all his books
>feminist
????

>moore is the least sexist person there is

Writing about rape doesn't mean you can't be feminist. If you write about a story serial killer that doesn't mean you're pro-murder.

The point is Rorschach was a good person but he's been so crushed by the cruelty of humanity it has caused his own humanity to whither away.

It literally is though. Are you dense? Do you not understand what the word "sympathetic" means?

Can't believe I'm arguing with a Rorschach sympathizer.

>stinky, sociopath, likes to torture everyone in his way, doesn't give a fuck about his friends, stubborn
yeah, he is not a good person. That is the point of his character.

He writes it purely for titillation though.

Dont get me started on the highly charged League of Extraordinary Gentlemen panels.

>bad people are "sympathetic" because they went through trauma

Fuck you guys up the fucking ass. Plenty of people go through worse trauma and come out the other end just fine (myself included). If you turn out like Rorschach, it's because you chose to.

Moore is known for donating to pro-women for-gay campaigns. the thing is that it has a scope of what sex is very rare. He had polygamous relationships for several years and once had homosexual experiences.

With the amount of times it becomes a key plot point in hist stories, plus the existence of outright porn like Lost Girls, I'm pretty sure he has a rape kink.

Not like I can judge the guy, though.

I think everyone means to say they empathize with Rorschach the most

Then how are you supposed to view his backstory, smartass? How are you supposed to view all the scenes where he's unraveling from trauma?

This the guy is a liberal fruitloop. He also wrote Lost Girls, a magnum opus to female sexuality.

>babbys first post

the case of lost girl is curious, because not only did he write it, but also with his wife and also his other mistress.
He has the mentality that with pornography you can make good stories. and although the girl for many is considered bad, many artists think so but are usually eccentric

Some of the most dodgy stuff to be printed in comics has come out of ostensibly "liberal" writers.

Because he was supposed to be this character that everyone made fun of. Probably in response to Frank Miller's Batman. But I love him, of course, his method of living is fucking insane and he's a fucking asshole who probably loves to tell how it is but probably doesn't like it on how it's told for him.

But I think he's definitely sympathetic than most heroes because it's obvious that he tried to do the system's way and the system fails on him. Constantly. And when you get failed so many times, there is nothing what you can do.

Should we really be reading this guy's books.. he seems rather unstable.

He also had a difficult life, his first wife who became pregnant when he was 20 left him alone with the baby while she ran away with her lesbian lover. which in fact was known to also have relationships with moore sooo

That last part hurt my brain

Yet he was so human that he would rather die than hold a horrible truth from the public.

It's simple: you're wrong.

You're supposed to empathize with his emotional state, not be sympathetic to his actions.

Learn the difference.

10/10

Oh, so you're just an autist.

I like the character, but people overestimate just how much of a badass he was. He's basically a thuggish idiot who's investigation in to Edward Blake's murder basically consisted of "Go around breaking people's fingers until someone gives me the answer I want", and was doomed to failure from the start due to his confirmation bias towards his 'cape killer' pet theory. He stumbles on to clues haphazardly, reaches correct conclusions through incorrect assumptions (Don't trust Adrian Veidt...because he's a liberal and possible homosexual, so he is inherently untrustworthy), and is almost effortlessly outmaneuvered and framed by Veidt, and likely would've died with everyone else in New York if Dan hadn't sprung him).

He basically spends most of the book making every incorrect decision imaginable, and his level of incompetence is confirmed when Dan, who's able to go over his jumbled mess of 'clues', quickly dismisses his cape-killer theory as full of holes and manages to solve the mystery in a matter of hours through basic detective work.

>He's basically a thuggish idiot who's investigation in to Edward Blake's murder basically consisted of "Go around breaking people's fingers until someone gives me the answer I want"
Am I an autist, or were a lot of those scenes meant to have an element of black comedy to them? Some of the stuff Rorschach does is downright ridiculous in how casual he is, like him throwing that supervillain down an elevator shaft and the reaction those thugs have when he first enters the bar.

>90% of the comic community

Nah. You mean Sup Forums and other similar sects of the internet. Most people love him.

Anyways, to answer your question:
Because they're a bunch of insecure contrarian retards who feel the need to hate him because they either a.) liked Rorschach when they were younger and want to distance themselves from their younger selves but don't know how to do it like an adult, much like a 14 year old repeatedly making fun of their younger sibling for liking Pokemon cards simply because they did at the same age or b.) saw that some undesirable fanbase (i.e reddit or something) has come to like the character, and they all just use the "b-but he's not supposed to be liked!" excuse as a cover.

It's true and you all know it.

He's not supposed to be horrible and unempathetic, but a psycho with a heart of gold. When he's off duty he breaks into his friend's house to eat beans. Even when he first started going out as Rorschach he wasn't in the best frame of mind. As he kept going he kept getting crueler and crueler with his methods. Finally, he had the means to stop Ozymandias, but only after he blew up half of New York and by that pont, everyone else saw it fit to let it be because it essentially brought about world peace. Then in Doomsday Clock, it brings Ozy's utopia to an end, thus creating anarchy.
He's a good guu, but he's in no way someone you'd want to be.

The best analogy I can give for Rorschach is his mask: Stark black and white, but constantly changing what is and isn't black/white. He's a hypocritical thug with a god-complex. By his own logic, the Comedian should have been killed a long time ago, but instead reveres him because he's an "All-American".

...examples? For... research of course.

I don't think Rorschach is unsympathetic

It is black comedy, but something being funny in the context of a story doesn't make the character someone you want to sympathize with.

Self proclaimed, proud liberals are some of the most sexist assists there are!

m8, I don't even have a stake in this argument, I just wanted to know if I was supposed to find those parts funny.

No, that's exactly the correct reading. Rorshach thinks he's the good guy, but he's too crazy and stupid to realize he's almost as bad as all the crooks he keeps assaulting. He's a completely incometent detective, the only thing he's got going for him is he's good at fighting and breaking out of a bad spot. Rorshach is admirable for his dedication to his cause, but his cause is frequently warped and he's a fuck up not just as a crime fighter but as a human being.

Some of the justifications in this thread are making me wonder if you might be onto something

Given that characters in the story can't help but laugh at the elevator one, yes, you should have found it funny.

why do people say he might be a homosexual? I never got that from reading watchmen

Jokes on you, buckaroo. My first book was Red Son.

People think that? IIRC he mentions lusting after women when he's not in his superhero persona.

More often than you'd think

He always seemed pretty much asexual to me though, what with his description of having a dream of his mother fucking some man as an Eldtrichean horror

The articles I've read arguing his homosexuality have been really stretching.

Yet here you are, leading your unremarkable life. You had all those experiences from your past, and yet instead of letting it fuel your ambitions, all you did was run away from it in order to find comfort and attain that mystical state called "normalcy". Well you couldn't, because your past is with you forever. If you're truly as moral as you make yourself believe, you'd have dedicated your life to doing as much good as possible, however you want to define "good".

Cowards have no right to talk about decisions of the brave.

He has a massive maddona-whore complex. He never lusts after any women (He does have a line about not being offered "American love" by prostitutes, take that however you will), and in general seems to be disgusted by the very concept of sex. That combined with the fact that the only semi-functional relationship he seems to have in the book is with Dan leads to a few assumptions.

>
He has a massive maddona-whore complex. He never lusts after any women (He does have a line about not being offered "American love" by prostitutes, take that however you will), and in general seems to be disgusted by the very concept of sex. That combined with the fact that the only semi-functional relationship he seems to have in the book is with Dan leads to a few assumptions.

That's why to me it seems to further him being completely repulsed by sex even more. He downright apologizes to Dan at one point, it rather feels he knows that's the only thing he has going for him as a friendship and he doesn't want to jeopardize that.

Because he calls Veidt a faggot, and vain homosexuals (and the people who listen to them) seem to believe that all homophobes are secretly faggots themselves because their narcissism does not allow them to see that many people just genuinely do not like gays.

Was Butcher sympathetic and human?

Rorschach is the severe nutcase equivalent of someone who was abused as a child and decided to become a cop and use it as fuel to do good in the world. That's honorable and you're treating that like it's some sort of bad thing. Congratulations on being a boring uninhabited, impassive normalfag I guess.

I was alive and collecting comics when Watchmen came out. At the time, Rorschach was one of the most popular of the characters. His lines are the most quotable by far.Novody drops Nite Owl lines around the D and D table.
Everyone hated on the Comedian because muh Bush. But he was always my favorite.

>vain homosexuals (and the people who listen to them) seem to believe that all homophobes are secretly faggots themselves

I'm a bifag and when I first read Watchmen I simply assumed he was just normal for someone in the 80s, especially someone who seemingly values masculinity and heroism as much as Rorschach does in his own unique way, and never gave it any more thought. I'm surprised by the amount of people who genuinely think he's gay. I thought it was a meme.

It's more that straight people are obsessed with the concept that homophobes must secretly be gay because they're terrified of the idea that another straight person could be a bigot.

Not really, Rorschach is basically what Moore thinks a character like The Question or Mr. A would be like in real life: that being a manlet hobo loser with extreme delusions of grandeur and an extremist, but nevertheless incredibly hypocritical view on morality and ethics.

His dedication to his principles and refusal to compromise is admirable, but the man himself is incredibly flawed, and calling his actions 'honorable' is questionable at best.

Rorshach is so sexually repressed it's hard to say he has any sexual preferences. He knew johns were constantly fucking his mom and it's implied she might've abused him sexually as well as physically, so that would explain why he's super uncomfortable with the female form and repulsed by anything sexy. It's worth noting that she he feels like he needs to tell Laurie that he doesn't like how revealing her costume is, he doesn't seem to give a shit about Manhattan's permanent nudity.

He wrote that and drew that little cartoon when he was a kid, he didn't know what sex was so it was just something scary and confusing to him. The fact that both of them seemed to be enjoying something that, to him, looked painful and violent made him uncomfortable.

Dan/Rorschach is an incredibly popular pairing so maybe it's just people with a bias? I never got the impression that he was into either gender at all.

>it's implied she might've abused him sexually

Where? I never got that impression, but then, I've only read the graphic novel once, and the movie skips a lot of stuff as movies must.

His psych profile says that he was exposed to the worst possible elements of his mom's lifestyle. They live in a slum, she could not give less of a shit about what happens to her son, and men come in and out of their apartment at all hours of the day. Do the math.

Though desu, just being in that environment is in itself a form of sexual abuse, so he may not have necessarily been diddled. I honestly think he was but I'll admit it's headcanon.

What's up with Moore's hatred for The Question anyway? I've never read Ditko's earlier stuff for him, mind you, but everything else I've seen never gave me the impression he was a fascist or a loser.

>incredibly popular

It has pretty much no fan art and probably 200 fics maximum. I mean yeah sure it's a thing but it's not a BIG thing.

Depends on your definition of sexual abuse. I don't think it was explicitly shown/stated that he was, say, raped or fondled but we know he probably saw and heard his mom get fucked a lot. As said it's moreso a popular headcanon made from logical conclusions. It's more likely, in my opinion, that one of the random clients would've abused him if anyone did instead of his mother.

You weren't around for the movie's heyday. It had a very popular kink meme with tons of Dan/Ror fics. It was also very popular in the doujin scene as well. Of course it's different nowadays, but the fandom does keep it alive.

Why do people in this thread keep calling him a hobo? He's not homeless he has a shitty apartment.

>spends all day walking around in circles with a sandwich board sign
>spends all night fighting crime
>lives in squalor
I don't know how he's able to get rent, but he definitely doesn't have a job.

He hated The Question, and Mr. A in particular, because they were basically mouthpieces for Ditko's bugfuck insane Objectivist views on morality. He basically made Rorschach to show how these views are delusional at best, and outright dangerous at worst.

Bear in mind that modern Vic Sage is a much, much more subdued character than how Ditko originally envisioned him, especially the DCAU version, who's basically Rorschach-lite without being a right-wing nutjob.