I see this discussion taking shape with two sides; One camp says anything and everything can be done to and with mainstream (and here I use this term to differentiate from creator-owned) superheroes because anything can be retconned or forgotten. In this view, make Peter Parker a thief or a rapist in an arc, that's cool.  People will either buy it and remember it or they won't and it'll be forgotten.  In the end, there's no editorial reign and anything goes with any character on the map.  The other camp says that things should generally remain the same with mainstream superheroes such that an illusion of change is all that's needed in order to feel something like momentum for a given character.  "Change" and "realism" are all fine and good as long as the core of the character(s) remains the same.  In other words, Peter Parker would never become a thief or a rapist because that's not who Peter Parker is and, as such, that story should never be told. 

Me?  I fall in the latter camp, no surprise.  I think it's very important to make the distinction between mainstream superheroes who have been around for decades as opposed to creator-owned or newly created characters.  INVINCIBLE by Robert Kirkman falls into the latter category.  So does WATCHMEN.  Personally, I don't find it to be the greatest work in the genre by a long shot, but that's my personal bent.  Should it never have been written?  I don't think so.  You can't hold pale imitations up to the originator and blame the original, as has been said here in this thread time and again.  Miller shouldn't be held responsible for the Batman we've seen for two decades, for example, because the character he wrote about was in it's own universe, it's own continuity, in a world separate and apart from the DCU.  A "What If..." if you will.  Editorial should have pulled the reigns in on making the mainstream version of the character less in line with Miller's depiction every bit as much as they should have lessened the psychopathic, borderline crazy, and decidedly darker elements they let in post-WATCHMEN. 

In the end, I think that mainstream superheroes should be written for an all-ages audience.  They can certainly explore "realistic" themes as long as they remain true to who they are and are not forced to be in a story they would otherwise not be a participant . THE ULTIMATES comes to mind here, in that the story doesn't have as much of an impact if you take out the names of the regular MU heroes being appropriated to tell that story. It's a cheat to me, riding the coattails of a name to pander to an adult audience who would better be served reading comic books intended for an adult audience using characters specifically created to tell that story.

What's this all mean?  Mainstream superhero comics can and should have stories that should never be told.  Not everything goes, nor should everything under the sun be allowed to be published and let the world work it out.  Creator-owned comics can and should be allowed to tell any story they wish to tell and let the world sort out their worth.

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Spot on, Matt. A post so correct, I simply had to repeat it here.

All too many of today's comics warp the characters to fit the stories. It's all about the "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" mentality.

I'd lump a great many of today's stories into the "What If?" category, but that would be insulting the real "What If?" stories of the past, which usually took into account everything you mentioned above. Real "What If? stories (usually) followed the established rules, and merely changed a single historical event in order to lead the story in a different direction from the original.

As opposed to throwing out decades of characterization and history so as to make a mark.

Why doesn't doing the right thing ONCE make you a superhero (guided by the assumption that Rorschach has never done the right thing before)?

No this is a bullshit line of argument.

In the Fantastic Four a strange scientist steals Ben Grimm's form and endangers Reed while he is investigating subspace. He does this because he is resentful of Richards and thinks of Richards as someone who caught all the right breaks while other scientists like him are ostracized and laughed at. He doesn't even know the man directly. But he hates him enough to try to kill him.

Once he sees how the rest of the Fantastic Four react to the possibility of losing Reed does he rethink his animus. He sees that Reed deserves his accolades and would leave a huge whole in the lives of his cohorts if he died. He enters subspace and saves Reed by physically throwing him back to the portal. He then sits down and prepares to die from the very peril he exposed Reed to and later saved him from.

Just then the real Thing shows up and this causes Reed to realize that the Thing who saved him was an imposter. At the end Mr. Fantastic concludes that the imposter has paid the price for his transgressions and owned up to them like a man.

So is that imposter scientist suddenly transformed into a superhero by his one instance of repenting and doing the right thing? Or is he resentful harmful person who at the last moment realized his error and did the right thing for once? He doesn;t seem like much of a super hero to me. Just a reformed bastatrd. That's more admirable than some unreformed bastard but it's a far cry from being a super hero.

And as for "my assumption" that Rorshach has never done the right thing before...we are talking about the book itself and what is in it and not strange hypothetical exceptions to the character as shown. In the book he is a violent kook who THINKS he is a superhero but is not. 

You somehow seem to be more interested in trying to sow confusion where there is none and looking for ad hoc loop holes than forming a coherent apologetics argument for the Watchmen being an example of a superhero comic rather than somethingthat has affected the rather shallow appearence of one.

superheroism and heroism are both subjective.

How so?

I don't agree that he does the right thing as a consequence of his madness or that, even if this were the case, it makes it less heroic. I think you can argue your intepretation but I don't think you can state that this is conclusively that the insanity is motivating Rorschach, here.

Then I have to call into question your ability to read comics. Moore paints Rorshach throughout as a broken, violent, kook who is losing touch with right and wrong. He is demented and focused on destroying and intimidating crime more than justice. he hates certain groups of people. He is despicable but self righteous. He is relentless. He cannot stop what he is doing. He is a satire of Mr. A/Question except Moore thinks that we should be able to visibly see that he is ugly and corrupt beneath his mask and covered in grime and he even has Night Owl comment on how bad he smells. He even has the trademark "ugly past" that Mr. A pontificates is no excuse for evil. He is constrcuted almost a direct argument against his own espoused philosophy of extremes and black and white thinking. He is supposed to be a warning of what happens when you can't or won't ever compromise or moderate your brutal maddening personal ethics. You become a tortured smelly crazy bum in a costume chained to some twisted extreme of your philosophy.

This does not make him an unusual superhero. It makes him a crazy who THINKS he is a superhero but is really more of a thug tolerable only because he acts out his fantasies on OTHER thugs.

He is a pathological mess. Moore uses him to show that a Superhero brought into the light of real world is at best a diseased authoritarian elitist monster who is redeemable only in that doesn't inflict his kink on the innocent(excepting Veidt and the Comedian). In short Moore's message is that in the real world Superheroes are impossible and a dangerous idea. This might be right but it has litle place in superhero stories which are NOT about being real or realistic.

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"Rorshach is intended as a "take" on Ditko's Mr. A and Question characters. He is supposed to show how such characters are unheroic and instead obssessed, insane, bloodthirtsy, cruel and vindictive rather than truly just or decent."

***********

Really?

Yeah Really.

Next time you're talking to Alan Moore can you ask him if Veidt was really supposed to be the smartest man in the world?

So what's your counter argument then smart ass? And how will you support it? How is Rorshach a real superhero? Where does his craziness go away? What pannel? Aren't you going to expound on the subjectivity of "the world's smartest man" or even if the name "Adrian Veidt" is really the characters name?  

Apparently he tells you what his intent is so maybe you can have him settle this debate James and I having going.

Or maybe you could actually make and support an actual argument instead of just asking nebulous (and often absurd) "what if" and " isn't that subjective?" type questions.

If you can't see the transparent intent of Watchmen and the pall it casts on the concept of super heroes ....

Either Moore is a sucky writer (who in your version seems to have INADVERTENTLY or ARBITRAILY AND PERHIPHERALLY made Rorshach look more a creature of obssession than morality via his appearence and history and habits...just for variety)  or you are just a reader who feels the need  to subjectively handwave Rorshach into being a superhero because you want it to be true. 

Perhaps then Watchmen IS just a new kind of superhero book instead of a proof that real life does not suffer the existance of superheroes. Lacking the pressure of their old editorial limits the superheroes quickly break down like transuranian elements into bebased toxic things that we can quickly relate to and more readily create power fantasies from..

Crazy or vicious or cold blooded anti-heroes or even horror protegonists suddenly become superheroes as much as the silver age Superman then. They just, according to the new taxonomy, belong to a different branch of the tree...based on some degenerated "realistic" form of heroism instead of the noble "facile" ideals of their more simplistic and tame antecedents.

The gritty sci-fi/fantasy pulp/noir and the satire  crowd suddenly wants a place on the shrinking superheroic ice flow. I guess that when everyone has a white hat there will be no more true villains. Just various breeds of "goodguy from a certain point of view" punching each other out over social issues and misunderstandings.

I like Watchman, but I don't think its a good heroic adventure. I don't think that was its intent.

I think the story is *about* how people respond to the world and the power of fixed beliefs. What is it rational to do in a world that may be heading for nuclear war (Ozymandias fear) or be devoid of meaningful free-will (Dr Manhatten's view, before he changes his mind, or spiralling into the gutter (Rorsach's opinion). They could have been men meeting to debate philosophy in a room but that would be a bit dull. Giving them a classic superheroic set of personas from the Charlton heros gives it all a broader canvas, scope for action, and a market, and - whereas I share disdain for chortle-chortle-isn't-heroism-inherently-funny-mockeries - I don't object to thoughtful metaphorical usage, or entertaining comedy. [I liked Mystery Men for instance, they may be rubbish superhero wantabes with poor to non-existant powers but they go in and they make a difference damn it!]

If we want to look at is as a 'superheroic adventure' alone, on those terms, Ozymandias, and Dr Manhatten are villains: that is 'threats' to a human - 'humane' existance.

Dr Manhatten's humanity has burned out into a deterministic mechanism, at some point he will abandon mankind, and what will happen then if US foriegn policy is predicated on his deterrant capacity, or worse he might decide to be God, as the censored statement of the scientist 'God exists and he's American' points out.

Ozymandias is being tagged dramatically as a maniac [in my reading] from the moment he sits unconcerned chewing a stalk of grass on his parent's tombstone identifying himself with Alexander the Great!  Not the most rational of acts. We are drawn in because of his superheroic trappings, but if you're *not* Doc Savage or Superman with real human lifes to return too (the former his five associates and his cousin Pat - peers he can genuinely like even if he outstrips them all -, the latter his even healthier life as Clark Kent) then voluntarily exiling yourself to having your only social interaction being waited on by three servants at the North Pole *isn't* healthy. Ozymandia calls politicians 'washington humanoids' at one point, but the real 'humanoid' is him, he's even less human than Manhatten who is [however peculiarly, given that he should see the end of the argument in advance and then its hard to see 'why' he only acts on it post facto, but this is a flaw in determinism itself] at least open to argument

Incidently Ozymandias not wanting people to die: I don't buy this self justifying 'I forced myself to feel every death' nonsense.  He kills everyone in the pyramid leading to him, including his three closest aides, he personally kills the man he sets up to fake the attack on himself, he personally kills Blake, he kills all the people in New York point zero. I don't value an intelligence that can only turn the metaphorical 'cutting the Gordian Knot' into a solution by build on killing, but then I don't think the author intends we should. He intends that its a *possible* choice for us to make to say 'Yes Ozymandias was right' but writes material specifically undercutting it. The black freighter story is has been rightly pointed out, a metaphorical tale of the fear of nuclear war, and its 'pointer' dramatically is that Veidt's fear is wrong.  An understandable but destructive psychosis that slays what it attempts to protect. The people in NY are just as dead as if there had been a nuke. He didn't 'protect' them.

Incidently we never see the Soviets, it might well be that they're ruined their economy in 'Dr Manhatten' creating attempts, and that they will spend themselves in Afghanistan an collapse as ours did. If Moore had wanted us to genuinely believe Ozymandias all he'd have needed to do was to show them, nearly pressing the button, considering it as the news of NY broke. Or even a partial attack, called off.

The real 'valuable' people in Watchman are Owlman and the Silk Spectre, who - despite their flaws - come out of retirement and do their best, and affirm that life has value at a 'human' level.  [The real criticism that could be levelled at Watchman is that in the end this is actually a rather platitudinous themes, but no more so than many 'morals' in books.]

Simon BJ

Rorschach is not intended to show "such" characters are unheroic and psychotic.

Sure he is. He is such a character and he IS unheroic and psychotic. By intent.

You really missed the sub-text on Rorschach.

No I didn't.

Rorschach sees the world very clearly, as the culmination of a lifetime of observing conspiracy in every shadow, and being dead-set no matter what, no matter how much brutality is called for, no matter the argument.

But he doesn't see the world clearly at all. He is portrayed as a broken man who believes in and chases phantoms. He is a nutjob. He is not a wiseman in any real sense.

What is WRONG is WRONG, what is RIGHT is RIGHT. Rorschach's basic belief in justice is uncompromising.

And it is more an element of his own painful past and his own pathological response to that than any real intellectual morality hard won through life experireince and study. Rorschach's idea of justice is extremely flawed and antisocial. And it is largely an outlet for his violent urges.

He takes Moloch to task for not having a permit for the revolver Moloch has in his possession; it is Rorschach observing the letter of the Law.

Which is not generally a strong indicator of a real sense of justice but more  what one expects of someone looking for an excuse to act against someone he wants to pound out of existence. We do not need superheroes to go around picking up unlicensed weapons from people who used to commit crimes and then beat the snot out of them. This is not really a superheroic function.

Rorschach's naivety, his "heroism" is shattered by the watchdog scene: it is his realization that the two-fisted detective hero, himself, had entered the insane universe of actual reality, OUR world.

Yeah. And he deals with it by reenacting a scene from Mad Max. Very heroic. No wait. It crosses the line into vengeance and eradication of evil with as much suffering inflicted and as little dignity as possible. His uncompromising "philosophy" is shown to be a destructive and pathological influenece on him and it IS a naive state of mind. It is not a product of sound reason.

A world of chaos, destruction, inanity, stupidity, immorality. Rorschach is also in his 50s in this story, a man cut off from society, paranoid, rarely communicating with anyone he can respect. His hermit/forest dweller persona gradually deteriorates under the weight of horror stemming from that child's murder, and the murder of Kitty Genovese as well.

Yeah. It drives him nuts. That's my point.

This is not indicative of any other hero in the story, or in the Big Two, or the Question or Mr. A.

It is essentially an illustration of a Mr. A/Question  clone going nuts in the real world. It is Vic Sage suddenly shown that his philosophy is untennable without a lot of fiddling by the author to keep him looking and feeling OK. The idea that you aren't supposed to associate it with Mr. A and the Question and see it as essentially what would happen to the Question in our REAL world is silly and pretty much contrary to the story.

This is Rorschach's particular story. He's not symbolic of anything except his own determination to hang on to a shred of integrity, as he sees it.

Not so much.

WATCHMEN doesn't cast these heroes as what you described just for the sake of it.

But it DOES do it just the same. And it doesn't do it in a vaccum either. Miracle Man springs to mind. There is a defintite hostility there in this work. And it has the flavor of teaching stupid sheltered comic book nerds that superheros are stupid bullshit that spontaneously evaporates into something much more gruesome in the face of REAL moral quandaries such as we face in day to day life. It is Alan Moore saying "read a book!"  to some fat kid in a stained superman t-shirt.

They become what they are because of a reaction to their loss of innocence.

"Innocence" here standing in for "stupider"  or "less realistic" comic book writers who keep their superheroes in an unrealistic world instead of studying the corrosive possibilities of the real world on the concepts of a real human trying to pactice superheroism.

If anything, Moore is simply summing up what most thinking human beings feel about existence and human integrity, and in the end his outlook remains strangely positive, when broken down into the mathematical probabilities of humans existing AT ALL, due to the cosmic biochemical factors and their proper alignment to produce humankind.

Yeah. The superheroes all turned out to be kooks or bastards or power trippers or unstable or just disappointing . They fuck up and get smacked around hard by a guy who saw them coming a mile away and yet it didn't really matter(unless you live in New York...small price to pay though for world peace right?). Nuclear war is adverted, Dreiberg gets some poontang, the kooks get a neat conspiracy story to sun in their scary right wing nut newspaper, and we all get to throw rocks at Nixon again! Sweet!

So, the shriek against WATCHMEN comes off as Alan Moore bias and hatred, not an accurate view at all of his work in this particular story.

Horse feathers.

Well, just to give people a more concrete view on Watchmen, here's an interview about the characters from Moore himself:

The Watchmen characters, I've read that they're based on DC Universe characters but I know very little about those old superheroes

Well, I mean, it's a fairly minor fact but what originally happened was that me and Dave [Gibbons] had got an idea for a kind of a superhero story which we figured needed a whole continuity of characters, not a big continuity but a whole continuity of characters, like we figured that if there were any superhero characters from old defunct comic companies lying around, that we could take a whole bunch of them wholesale and then tell this story starting with the murder of one of them, that would take these kind of familiar old-fashioned superheroes into a completely new realm. Now, at that time Dick Giordano was working for DC Comics. Now, Dick had previously been working for a company called Charlton comics. Now, while he was at Charlton he had overseen the creation of a number of characters that are still remembered with vague nostalgic affection by comic readers and comic fans. These included a lot of characters that had been created or co-created by Steve Ditko, including the Blue Beetle; the Question, who was as sort of moral extremist vigilante in the Steve Ditko mould at the time; a nuclear character called Captain Atom; there was a character called Thunderbolt, a man who had got control of the full ten-tenths of his brain capacity and was thus capable of astonishing mental and physical feats. You know, these are fairly forgettable superheroes but -

- Was there a guy with a hat and a mac?

There was a guy with a hat and a mac, that was the Question, who was also very similar to Steve Ditko's far more right-wing character, Mister A, that was too right-wing to put in mainstream comics but which Ditko had published some strips about in independent comics at the time. Mister A was an absolute insane fascist but done absolutely straight. So we originally said that we could do the story about the Charlton characters because DC had just acquired the rights to the Charlton characters and Dick Giordano had asked if we could do anything with them. So me and Dave kind of laid out this plan for what we could do with the characters. Now, although they liked the idea of it, they had only just paid to acquire the Charlton characters, so they didn't fancy the idea of a series where at the end of it a couple of them would be dead and a couple of them would be too messed up to really work with any more, so they said "Why don't you come up with your own characters?" So we said okay and then just took the Charlton characters as a starting point and in a way it was a perfect solution because Captain Atom was a nuclear superhero but he's nowhere near as interesting as Doctor Manhattan!

No way, I wouldn't imagine so.

With Dr Manhattan we were able to bring in all this kind of quantum consciousness.

And the fact that he'd changed the world and so on.

Yeah! We were able to do all this stuff, so yeah, it was much better the way it eventually worked out but there was a sort of a seed of the original Charlton characters but we took them further. Steve Ditko's Question/Mister A, Rorschach is a kind of logical extension of that character but I'm sure it's not one that Steve Ditko himself ever imagined, in fact I did hear that someone was interviewing Steve Ditko and asked him whether he'd seen Watchmen and this character in it called Rorschach and he said "Oh yes, I know that, he's the one who's like Mister A, except Rorschach is insane." [Laughs] I thought, well yeah, that's about what I'd expect! Well, Mister A wasn't, presumably. Yeah so it was just taking these ordinary characters and just taking them a step to the left or right, just twisting them a little bit.

Speaking of Rorschach, he takes off his mask to face death at the end. I only noticed that reading it again recently. Has he had some kind of psychological epiphany, or - ?

I'm not sure, I'm not sure, it just seemed right. I mean, a lot of these things you just - I kind of felt that's what he'd do. I don't know, I don't know why. I couldn't logically say why the character should do that but it just felt right. At the end this is not the mask talking, it's not Rorschach, it's the actual human being that is somewhere under there.

Yeah, it's just amazing that it comes out because you kind of think that that person is dead, you know?

But he's there. There's still this kid who had an awful time at children's homes. And that is the moment when he's going to die, that he wants it to be that personality that's at the forefront, or something. I don't know, I couldn't really explain why I did it, it just seemed like what I'd do if I was Rorschach, which is the only way that I can really justify the actions of any of the characters.

Okay, Emery, I've read "This Man, This Monster" before. No, I don't think that the character in it which you cite is a hero, because he sets the chain of events into motion which ultimately causes him to need to destroy himself to save the other people. If Rorschach was the one responsible for causing the carnage in New York which led him to need to go back to New York to tell people what happened (sounds stupid doesn't it?), then it would be a fair comparison. The mad scientist in FF 51 dies to rectify a mistake that he has made, Rorschach dies because he refuses to compromise on a matter which he considers wrong.

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"And as for "my assumption" that Rorshach has never done the right thing before...we are talking about the book itself and what is in it and not strange hypothetical exceptions to the character as shown. In the book he is a violent kook who THINKS he is a superhero but is not."

**********

Fair enough. I can see that I may have made "strange hypothetical expectations..." Sorry. We see Rorschach doing the good thing and fighting the good fight until the death of Kitty Genovese sends him off of the deep end, I can see how you would see him as a violent kook after this (I do, too, for the most part), but I think he's redeemed and dies as a superhero when he can still recognize the right thing to do and dies doing it. I don't think he does it because he's crazy and Moore is equating the right thing to do in that situation with insanity; I think he does it because he, at the end, is acting the part of the hero.

You ask me how heroism and superheroism are both objective terms. I mean that what you consider heroism might not be what I consider heroism. The fact that you and I are having this debate about whether or not Rorschach is heroic indicates that it's subjective, because I don't think we're both ignorant or oblivious about what a dictionary says the word means. Not to dredge things up or make unfair examples, but there was that debate on this message board about whether or not Christopher Reeves was a hero. Some said yes and some said no. In my opinion, both sides were right. If someone is a hero to you, they are a hero, but you can't expect people to be in 100% consensus over what person is a hero or which person isn't. Regardless of what came before, Kovacs knowingly went to his death because he couldn't live with himself unless he tried to report what happened. That to me is heroism.   

I can see your line of thinking, Emery: Rorschach is no hero because one decent act, likely caused by his paranoia and insanity, does not make up for his vicious vigilantism and, furthermore, he is never presented by Moore as a hero but rather, deliberately as a laughably ugly and short man. Here's my line of thinking: It is amazing that Rorschach, the psychotic character and least typically "heroic" of the characters is the one that tries to do the right thing, and, when he has a moment of clarity (the stripping away of his mask revealing himself crying [a very un-crazy recognition of the effect his actions are likely to have or an expression of pity for those killed or both]) and dies going back to America, he dies a hero.  

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"Rorshach is intended as a "take" on Ditko's Mr. A and Question characters. He is supposed to show how such characters are unheroic and instead obssessed, insane, bloodthirtsy, cruel and vindictive rather than truly just or decent."

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Emery, you can call me a smart ass, my line of thinking bullshit, and question my ability to read a comic, but unless you have an interview where Moore says that he deliberately made Rorschach to malign and mock characters like the Question (one might exist and you might be right, in which case I apologize), than you're acting as a mind reader or claiming that your interpretation is the only valid one. I can see why you make that claim about why Rorschach goes crazy-- in fact, it's very convincing and well thought out--I just choose to disagree with it.

++++++++++  

So what's your counter argument then smart ass? And how will you support it? How is Rorshach a real superhero? Where does his craziness go away? What pannel?

**********

Rorschach is a real superhero because he dies doing the right thing, even though he knows that the very attempt will kill him and it is unlikely he will succeed. His craziness goes away when we see that he is crying under his mask . That's the panel. Again, it demonstrates that he is sane enough to either comprehend what will happen to him for going against Veidt, that he feels pity for those who have died, or, likely, both. Is that acceptable? 

++++++++++

Aren't you going to expound on the subjectivity of "the world's smartest man" or even if the name "Adrian Veidt" is really the characters name?  

***********
Nope.

+++++++++++

[M]aybe you could actually make and support an actual argument instead of just asking nebulous (and often absurd) "what if" and " isn't that subjective?" type questions.

If you can't see the transparent intent of Watchmen and the pall it casts on the concept of super heroes ....

Either Moore is a sucky writer (who in your version seems to have INADVERTENTLY or ARBITRAILY AND PERHIPHERALLY made Rorshach look more a creature of obssession than morality via his appearence and history and habits...just for variety)  or you are just a reader who feels the need  to subjectively handwave Rorshach into being a superhero because you want it to be true. 

***********
The transparent intent? Again, I can see why my crying subjectivity and presenting what if scenarios pissed you off, but now you're just ignorantly and self-righteously imposing your intepretation of the comic book as the only one. I don't think I need to subjectively hardwire Rorschach for it to be true, I think I made it clear why I consider Rorschach heroic, and only in the last few minutes of his life. I also think that you're completely incapable or unwilling to try and understand anyone who has a different viewpoint from you.

Emery, you're so fantastically bias that you don't even know what you're reading.

You're faulting Rorschach for breaking under a psychological time bomb implanted in him as a child, which culminates in his wanton murder of the pedophile? How is this not the logical pejorative of a character who is, essentially, existential, whose very face is symbolic and, as the mask, is all there is after Kovacs "dies"? This doesn't deviate from Ditko's views, except in Moore's postulation of the "mask" in Moore's alternate future, and the fate of a character like Rorschach who lives and breathes and saturates himself with the filth of a degraded society is logical. Since Moore was writing about masks in the actual reality we live in, only forever changed by their presence, then this story and the characters was one way of doing that.

The other point about Rorschach: existing in his own fugue state, Rorschach snaps after the Keene Act which outlaws the masks. Facing his own extinction, for the mask is what he truly is, Rorschach's Ditko Objectionism alters to become a life raft for his own identity. In that, the damage to his psyche is evident, and his responses grow more extreme. Rorschach's torture and debasement of "scum" is the truly harsh indictment of the character as a raving psychotic? Rorschach turns out to be right in his brutality...the world in which they live is so far gone that it responds to nothing else. Even the smartest man in the world realizes that fact. Alexander cutting the Giordian Knot, which the entire culture, "our" culture and society, has become, is emblematic of the disease that Rorschach suffers from. Not madness, but meaninglessness.

It's clearly indicated that Rorschach, and all the Watchmen, become complacent and bored, as the public is bored BY them, leading to their being eventually outlawed, and directly influenced by the disappearance of the "super-villain". Moore is even smart enough to realize that, at DC in particular, the villains are often fairly underpowered in comparison to the heroes. In the "real" sense, how many villains would want to stick it out, battling futilely against the masks and losing again and again. Even the superheroes are bored by the clockwork mechanism of their duty as superheroes. Dr. Manhattan's "real" super powers make all of the masks moot anyway, as well as Vietnam, and the final nail is driven by the unionized police.

Rorschach's world view is heat-warped after the watchdog scene. Before it, he is merely eccentric. Moore suggests the loss of innocence, of the "silver age" that is the Minutemen, and uses the contrast of the Crimebusters/Watchmen whom SOCIETY (governmental and cultural) demands to exist. So the Comedian becomes a government assassin, Rorschach a vigilante, but they are the extremes. And that's really what the story presents as logical within its context. The extremes are the only hope for a world begging for death.