isabelthespy:

another thing i think a lot of people, fans and critics, get wrong about Watchmen is that we are supposed to read Rorschach as the hero of the story because he never compromises. this is why fans say they love him, in the end, because no matter what! even though it meant his own death! he never compromised! and this is also sometimes why i have seen people criticizing the book say, well of course we are supposed to view Rorschach as the hero because he never compromises, and then go on to list all these ways in which that is hugely problematic as though it is completely impossible that any of these have occurred to Alan Moore (a man who, i should mention, has said that he almost regrets writing the character of Rorschach because of the way fans send him letters being like “Rorschach is so awesome” which make him want to… well continue being a yeti-like recluse, i guess, since i guess that’s working for him).

i don’t know, it seems to me like a lot of people have internalized this assumption that never compromising = a good thing, even the best thing, which strikes me as… kind of stupid. i mean we all laughed when colbert made fun of bush for this, right? “this man thinks the same thing on wednesday that he did on monday, no matter what happens tuesday.” we laughed because of how painfully true that was with an emphasis on the painful, that Bush was all into not-compromising and that was fucking a huge number of people over in very real and horrific life and death ways.

and i think maybe this is another symptom of that thing i never shut up about, people’s continuing unwillingness to embrace the fact that Life Is Complicated. not compromising is too simple, because it assumes that the ideal you are not compromising is always no matter what the best thing to do in any given situation, when actually, to take a mundane example, “honesty is the best policy” is not a good ideal to apply when you think your friend’s haircut sucks. telling your friend that doesn’t make you a fucking hero, it makes you an asshole.

and i think one of the points of Watchmen is that things are complicated. and nothing is as simple as it seems. i mean book ends by just… completely unsettling everything that had just gotten settled, undermining ozymandias’s overly simplistic solution to the world’s problems.

so, no, i don’t think that i “have to admit” that Rorschach is a hero because he never compromises, because i don’t think that makes you a fucking hero. and i don’t think, also, that i have to read the book as suggesting that Rorschach is a hero for that reason, because there’s nothing within the book suggesting that that’s true. or alternately, as was posited by a friend of mine, Moore is portraying Rorschach as “the hero” of the story, but simultaneously undermining the very definition of hero he fits into. you know, his never compromising gets him dead, and so what? he doesn’t die to save anyone, or to prevent something terrible from happening, or what have you. he dies for totally selfish reasons - he couldn’t deal with living his life having compromised like that. not very heroic if you ask me.

i mean - you could extend this argument way past Watchmen of course if you wanted - like Odysseus, you could say, never compromises his fucking need to always have the last laugh, and where does that land him. at sea for ten years, the fucking ass.

or, to say it much shorter: sometimes compromise actually just means that you are a fucking adult.

there are books I could write about Watchmen. But yes, this. And the characters with whom you’re supposed to identify (Dan and Laurie) are together in the end knowing that the world is a mess and imperfect in a thousand little ways and they can’t fix it, and it’s beautiful. (Which is why I was SO PISSED that the movie spent like 3 minutes on a porno sex scene in the Owl blimp thing and cut out ENTIRELY the one at the end where they reach for each other out of this need that jumps right off the page.)

Also because the biggest theme of Watchmen is NO ONE IS A HERO, so clearly, um, yeah.