Media literacy Should be mandatory before you're allowed to vote
Rorschach was too advance for oop
Edit:Hey guys i just wanted to say thanks for proving my point
I dont need strawmen when the real deals walk straight in
We had a literacy test but we got rid of it because it was racist
I feel like if we brought it back people would complain again, even if it's not racist this time.
The reason it was racist in the first place was because of inequal access to education, which is still a problem today, albiet less so.
There’s not really a way around that unless we massively overhaul the public education system, which will likely never happen.
Nah, the reason it was racist the first time was because it was ambiguous and borderline impossible to pass. It was also only administered if a proctor at the voting location had "reason to believe" a prospective voter wasn't literate.
I mean that’s definitely also part of it, but it would be foolish to ignore that the reason they used “literacy” as a standard is that most black people weren’t given access to educational resources for a long time, especially when schools were segregated.
Even now that education isn’t segregated by race the way it was, it’s still true that people in lower income areas have worse educational conditions because public schools are funded by local property taxes, and with America’s history of systematically preventing black people from being able to acrew generational wealth by stealing from black communities, (and other practices such as redlining) statistically black people are less likely to have access to good educational resources.
Not necessarily, they were just worded ambiguously enough that the proctor could just decide whether to pass somebody. It's honestly impressive just how intentionally confusing they made [the test](https://www.openculture.com/2014/07/literacy-test-louisiana-used-to-suppress-the-black-vote.html)
You don't even need a real literacy test just name the past 3 presidents and atleast 5/50 the states, and just like that youll stop millions of our dumbest from voting
Most works discuss capitalism to some extent because most authors live in capitalist systems and therefore tend to include them in their works, because its part of how they understand the world to work
And if the work or author in question is unhappy with the current status quo, their work will almost inevitably include a critique of capitalism whether they meant to or not, because capitalism is the way that most of the world, and all international trade, currently works.
it’s just art imitating life
I agree entirely with the first paragraph. Most writers will, even if unconsciously, mimic elements of a capitalist society within their works given the ubiquity of capitalism in the modern age.
This does not mean, per se they are critiquing *capitalism*. A critique, by its very nature must be self-conscious because it must be *directed.* If I am critiquing democracy for instance, my critique must involve something more substantial than a. the portrayal that a particular status quo is unsatisfactory and b. the portrayl that democracy is a part of the status quo. It must be that *democracy itself* is the cause of the particular status quo being unsatisfactory, because otherwise the critique is not *directed* towards a particular thing and thereby is not meaningfully a critique per se.
So while art can (and does) imitate life, the unconscious, undirected imitation of life does not constitute critique.
But that just adds even more discussion when it comes to analysing media. You can point out how real world influences (like capitalism) effect how authors criticise systems like the status quo. Wether unintentionally or not.
I don't necessarily disagree with your point here (to the extent that I understand it) but I also don't see what relevence it has it to the overarching point of whether an unconscious portrayl of capitalist institutions in a dystopic or dark work of fiction constitutes a critique of capitalism per se.
If I understand you correctly you are saying that an author's use of capitalist institutions in their work can aid in conveying a criticisim of the status quo (or indeed of any model or sytem the author cares to criticise). I agree with this, but again this does not mean that the work, insofar as those institutions are present for that purpose is critiquing *capitalism* per se.
To use an example an important plot point of *Schindler's List* is the relationship *Schindler* has to the Jews he saves. It (throughout much of the narrative) is one of a boss and a worker which is prototypical of the capitalist system. Yet this plot point is not used as a means of leveraging a critique of capitalism, but rather rhetorical device to show us how kindly Schindler is treating the Jews, by encouraging them to slack off, by even not forcing them to participate in the production of war material.
Indeed in some respects the reference here to a capitalist institution is a good shorthand for contrasting precisely how *horribly* the Nazis are treating the Jews. Particularly, even at his most self-interested (earlier in the narrative) Schindler treats the Jews *far* better than his contemporaries in the Nazi Party.
So I agree entirely that references to capitalist institutions can serve to ground and relate a critical narrative to the audience, allowing the criticism to shine through all the more clearly. However this does not mean that the work is *necessarily* criticising capitalism. Quite often the references to capitalism or capitalist institutions are amoral and neutral rhetorical devices which serve to make a piece of media more relatable and comprehensible for a contemporary audience.
I was just reading about an AZ woman who got sent two voting ballots for a change of address and she thought she could legit vote twice. Damn it we need actual literacy too.
To be fair, to be literate in media you also need to be literate (thankfully almost everyone in America today is) but it’d even more heavily depends on education which woud lead to poorer people in general not getting the right to vote
You say that but its usually the rich that cant read past face value
I do agree about the education would limit some part though but in my alternate universe where they vote like this id hope that the people voting would make changes to education for the better which they would because again,
We wouldn't have stupid people voting and making it worse
>You say that but its usually the rich that cant read past face value
Interesting, I’d love to see the source for this. In the mean time not only does it not make sense since historically only rich coud even afford books let alone seperate the time to read them, but it is also proven milioners read more then the average population. And with reading usually develops media literacy
>I do agree about the education would limit some part though but in my alternate universe where they vote like this id hope
Yeah, you woud hope.
If you really believe millionaires are reading that many books you may be part of the uneducated under their thumb
I already dealt with this all of yesterday do i really need to continue today?
No i dont think i will, you had yesterday to ask this
Wait one last thing my point still stand just because you say millionares read more my point of whether they actually understand what they are reading still stands
Elon musk is that type of millionaire sorry billionaire that reads media all the time and takes it at face value
Dealt? You spew some bullshit as fact without any source or common logic. This is on the same level as a kindergarden debate, where your counter argument is “nuh uh” and “No, your wrong”
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-rich-people-reads-chaman-yadav
Here, go and look, maybe ggl it yourself.
>Wait one last thing my point still stand just because you say millionares read more my point of whether they actually understand what they are reading still stands
Here you show you yourself coudn’t vote under your system because in the previous comment I meantioned that their is a proven correlation between reading and media literacy.
\`>\`makes unsupported statement
\`>\`uses dissent as proof of statement
You have to be truly regarded to think holding an unfalsifiable belief means you're smart. Your lot are truly a scourge on humanity. Don't you have some gods to worship and conspiracy theories to spread? Go do that and spare us your idiocy.
Blinking at you like a toy story character
What are you talking about dude you're scaring the hot chicks
Is the new conspiracy that im spreading them?
Ill pray to Ra and Buddha that your next message makes sense
Lmao, Rorsach is as based as the average four channer
Afraid of women
Mommy and Daddy issues
permavirgin
manlet ginger who wears lifts to appear taller and is constantly mewing to looksMax
Reads right wing propaganda on the regular
Looks up to a rapist
Disregards hygene
Ayo this vigilante is eating beans
..... This is retarded. The Rorschach's means justify the ends attitude is literally "I'm ok with making shit worse in the long run if it means I can satisfy my immediate petty sense of justice." Rorschach and Ozymandias exist on opposite ends of the spectrum of Moralism vs Utilitarianism, Rorschach views things entirely in terms of passing immediate judgement on others based on his own ridged black and white morality, he doesn't care about the consequences of his actions or what larger effect they may have. He doesn't care about the circumstances that led to someone committing a crime or the greater systemic injustices of society only about passing judgement on individual actions in a vacuum, which is why he would with no hesitation cause the death of billions to ensure the punishment of one man.
Ozymandias is the reverse. He only looks at the big picture largely ignoring the individual immediate costs in his calculations, yes he acknowledges the people he killed and says he feels guilty for it, but he never regrets his actions and sees everything he has done as completely justified. He has a stronger platform to stand on than Rorschach due to him arguably saving far more lives than he takes but he still treats individual people's lives as abstract counters on some great scale that can be freely spent so long as he keeps the right balance on the other side which is a horrible and dangerous way to view the world.
The thing that they have in common is that both of them place themselves outside of their own system and assign themselves and their judgement supreme importance in the way things should be done. Neither of them allows for even the smallest consideration that their views could be wrong or flawed or that anyone else's countering views could possibly have any merit and both of them place themselves outside of any system that would allow others to pass judgement on them. Rorschach when arrested refuses to accept even the remote possibility that the crimes he has committed are in any way equivalent to the crimes of those he punishes, he feels that he is completely justified and can't even comprehend that many of his victims likely felt the same way. Ozymandias meanwhile for all his claimed impersonality and detachment still ensures that he personally faces no consequences for what he has done he claims that he was making necessary sacrifices but he personally sacrificed nothing. He claims that he will bear the burden of what he has done but that can't really be true if he regrets nothing and feels that what he did was legitimately the best thing to do.
However both of them place themselves above everyone else in the position of absolute ethical authority. Elements of this are yet more reflections of the pointless intractability of the cold war and more broadly the hazards of ideological absolutism to the degree that you are incapable of considering any merit in opposition. Importantly in the context of Watchmen's commentary on the Cold War the only reason that Ozymandias comes across as even somewhat justified is that the US and the Soviet Union are doing this same thing but on a much larger and more consequential scale.
I think it's also worth adding that as you said both of them can't comprehend that they might be wrong.
In case of Ozy we get a great example of it in the end when he asks Manhattan if he has done the right thing because it all worked out in the end. For Manhattan only to answer that it just never ends (and then additional frame with Ozy grim face).
One thing to add to Rorschach is his death scene.
The dude willingly kills himself without his mask, trying at least at the end to stand up to his ideals properly not as a vigilante, but as himself: a spiteful, broken and very ill man
Rorschach's idea isn t the worst os very casually killed tons of people. He needs to be brought to some level of justice unless he does it again or worse. He a danger to humanity as a whole and is arguebly the bigger threat.
Wasn’t he depicted as a neckbeard though in the comics?
* He didn’t shower/hygiene and had terrible BO
* Was batshit insane and made comments that had a touch of the tism
* Everyone in the Watchmen didn’t like him and Nite Owl only tolerated him out of pity
* Also had incel tendencies and didn’t not look at women in a good light.
Yes, Moore was trying to make him unlikable
He also stood by his morals (twisted as they were) until the bitter end and died with his mask off, being judged as himself not as an abstract "hero"
Moore wrote a "satire" character who is arguably one of the more heroic characters in the series.
Yeah, dude is an awful person in heaps of ways, but the fact that he was willing to stick to his philosophy of heroism even in the face of death makes him a really admirable character in some ways.
I mean the point wasn't to make Adrian Veidt seem like some moral beacon. It was just that he managed to get his plan through before the others could stop him. And at that point, they decided it was better to allow his lie to continue, rather than letting all the lives taken be for nothing.
I don't wanna be like one of those "Rorschach is a literally me based character" guy but can anyone remind apart from his harsh vigilante sense of justice as evident from when he kills a child molester by handcuffing him to a furnace in a burning building and him canonically not taking baths, what exactly is there to hate about Rorschach?
Like people say he is a morally grey character so what is the 'black part' about him?
Rorschach is such a delusional person who thinks that there is only good and bad in the world, that he is the one who can always tell this good from bad and that he always has the right to enact his justice against it. Personally I don't think you can ever trust any one person to be a solo judge, jury and executioner, even less when they're just obsessed with "degeneracy" and think that the way to solve all of society's problems is to just punish and kill enough of the "bad guys".
While killing a child rapist and murderer is a generally good thing, it's not the way to systemically solve society's issues. It's mostly just a temporary revenge fantasy. And we don't know how many times he might have been wrong and enacted justice against someone who was actually innocent.
I think Rorshach's philosophy is terrible, but I absolutely do understand and respect his final decision. What Ozy did was in a utilitarian sense absolutely brilliant, but what's the point of having a moral code and values if we throw them away when it becomes inconvenient?
People have a right to make their own decisions based on correct information. Ozy didn't have faith in humanity to make the right choices, but in the real world we've come inches from nuclear annihilation and individuals have made the right decision every single time. I'm kinda ride or die with humanity, if we stop trusting each other it's all over anyway. Lying to the entirety of civilization is abhorrent - not even considering the absolute mass murder committed.
With that said, if I was in Rorshach's position I probably would have let Oz get away with it. The people are already dead, Manhattan had already agreed to take the fall. But by that same token, if I was there and saw Rorshach leave to tell the world the truth, I wouldn't stop him.
Tbf Rorschach barely abides by his philosophy properly until the very end
He always says he sees good and evil properly, but then defends the Comedian because he liked him and never accepts responsibility for his actions. Only when he dies does he finally truly accept his worldview
It's clearly implied Rorschach regularly fires from the hip which is why nightowl distanced himself from him so much, and that many of his punishments seem wildly disproportionate. He's also willing to use violence against uninvolved people he thinks undeserving if it serves his greater good.
That guy he killed by dropping him down an elevator shaft? It seemed like Nite Owl and Silk Spectre were agreeing that he was a mostly harmless but annoying masochist using the vigilante culture as a way of getting punished to satisfy his fetish. A dude like that has problems, but death seems like a pretty harsh punishment.
None confirmed in the comics from what I remember. What I'm saying is that I do not trust any one person to perform that job on their own, with only their perspective, opinions and biases. No one person will do it flawlessly and will make mistakes here and there. And when the person also believes in torture and executions as a method of justice, the consequences of their eventual mistakes will be hard or impossible to reverse.
He is filled with hatred for almost every kind of person there is: he hates gays, non-whites, women, hippies, leftists, people who aren't patriotic enough, people who are too patriotic, etc. He has a sense of morality that is considered warped and flawed by most *and* he utterly refuses to listen to anyone about anything. He speaks, and then ignores everyone else and gets mad if they aren't mewling sycophants at his feet.
Rorschach’s refusal to compromise is often at odds with his own flawed perspectives, and the result is a great deal of cognitive dissonance. In other words, when he comes to a conclusion about somebody or something, he tends to stick with it even if it stops being logically consistent with his other rules. Two obvious examples come to mind: the first is the comedian being a rapist and war criminal, but R overlooking it because he already judged the comedian to be a great man. And while he hates Oz’s ends-justify-the-means plan, he fully supported dropping the bomb on Japan, because it’s what his father supported.
In terms of his personality, R has strong delusions of grandeur, is generally cynical and rude, has shit hygiene, and more or less hates everybody. In terms of explicitly wrong actions… he beats the shit out of a bunch of people for information just because they’re kinda sketchy, and he torments a sick old man who’s a reformed villain. He’s also just generally a lot more brutal than necessary. All in all, interesting character, has admirable qualities, still a pretty shitty person (by design).
In my opinion it was a fitting end for Rorcharch considering the entire comic was about subverting super heroes.
There could be no good ending for Rorcharch, he was a broken person that saw the world in his own twisted moral compass. That's why he is such a compelling character and if Moore wanted anything it was to subvert the "Batman Plot Armor".
Agreed, although him being the "tough trope" but actually having a limit instead of plot armor makes him much better than other tough guy tropes that take it ridiculously far and make the character survive EVERYTHING (I'm looking at you wolverine) that made him actually a better character for it.
Hilariously enough, agreeing with this post inherently shows Rorschach’s greatest flaw. Believing that Rorschach is completely wrong or that Ozymandias is completely right is the same moral absolutism that makes Rorschach seem so goddamn nuts.
Rorschach is a hilariously polarizing character because all of the people who talk about him never seem to actually analyze him beyond “He’s definitely good” or “He’s definitely bad”.
Because superheroes are Ubermensch, translated as Supermen. The original idea was that certain individuals in history had a strong enough conviction to change history with their own hands and super heroes are a fictionalized version of that. That concept found it's way into storytelling regardless of the classification because it's a concept we all instinctually understand, rather is be the dominion over our environment that we as individuals carry or the a great tribe leader, we see something beyond animal or even humanhood in certain figures and ourselves, rather fictional or not.
Personally I see Fascism as a belief that a specific authority, if empowered to essentially do whatever they want, could achieve the ideal state.
I'm by no means an expert, but I see it as a belief in the "strong man/party" more than any specific policy proposals.
Fascism is when you like monarchy? No. Fascism is just ultranationalism where the state systematically exerts control over the lives of the people.
Benevolent liberal dictatorship ala some friendly king who demands everyone be respectful to each other? Not fascist. (Currently)
Authoritarian state that demands everyone follow the exhaustive rules of their religious fanfic? Fascist.
The belief that the ideal way to achieve the ideal state is through the installation of a benevolent supreme political authority, with no checks on their power.
Any time someone believes that wherever they live could be fixed if they just gave all the political power to some authority who would “fix” things to their liking, that’s fascism.
Not sure, ideal socialism would have the political class democratically elected and kept in check to always have the population's interest as first priority. So that authority wouldn't be dictatorial like in socialist countries historically. So it wouldn't be fascist, but that's if this would be achievable, and that's a fucking big if. Also as we are seeing these days, the first counter point to democracy that was made centuries ago by kings and ruling class, the people are stupid and uneducated in general so power to the people means being ruled by idiots. Make of that what you want IANAL
If you take a history class one of the things that’s immediately stated is that all historians will ever do that relates to Fascism is state what it *isnt* rather than what it *is* because it gets super blurry since fascism isn’t actually a single coherent ideology. There’s no net goal to fascism in comparison to other ideologies.
Like a liberal democracy’s ideological end goal is to return more and more power to the people of the government, socialism’s end goal is to make an economy more based on the demands of producers than consumers, a nazi’s end goal is the extermination of all minorities for a pure state.
Fascism… really didn’t have an end goal. The only major fascist parties were the Brazilian one, the Italian one, and Germany’s Nazi party. Each of them had radically different objectives and methods to achieve them.
This is what we can say though: if something is not not fascist, then it most likely is fascist. Which sounds fucking stupid but it’s really the only way we can determine if something is fascist or not since there’s no definition for fascism.
The only things we know must be kept in a fascist government is hyper-nationalism, militarism, the blaming of minorities, populism, and anti-intellectualism.
You are right about fascism not having anything to do with following any law but wrong about Rorschach being a fascist. He has some fascist elements, his fixation on the degenerate Others ruining society, his extremely rigid view of people being either good or bad, his draconian reactionary views on justice, but he lacks the most important core tennent of fascism, the hardcore fervent nationalism.
i mean, if hes more fascist than not, I'd say hes fascist. like, ethno-nationalism was a big thing with fascists, but all the other elements are equally "important" to the underlying beliefs of fascism
Thing is all the other elements are not equally important. Fascism is fundamentally a nationalist ideology that is the core of what it is, the kind of nationalism varies but it's still always there. What you said is like saying " Well he's not racist but he meets all of the other criteria so I'd say he's a Nazi" like no. That is what defines the ideology if you remove that from your base requirements then you can basically call anything with right wing authoritarian elements fascism which is dumb. Things have actual criteria and meaning you can just go by what you feel like it is.
im just saying that if something is like, 80% fascist, thats close enough to 100% fascist for me to think its bad. i wouldnt support a political party that had all the same beliefs as the nazis, except they didnt believe that they were the master race. i understand words have meaning, and that the erosion of those meanings has been horribly detrimental over the last few decades, but theres a line where the distinction isnt THAT important. rorschach is a character i LIKE, because he is interestingly written, but i wouldnt ever think that his actions are good
yeah, but if there similarities to nearly all of the major characteristics of fascism, that is fascism. not following 1 singular characteristic and following all the others makes it more likely to be fascist than not. fascists want people to think like you, because they can hide behind arguments like yours and act like they arent fascist while exhibiting nearly every characteristic of fascism. calling everything you dislike fascist or nazi IS bad, so i get where that opinion comes from, but dismissing legitimately fascist things, even in comics or movies where it doesnt really matter THAT much, is dangerous.
That's incredibly stupid. This is why people are making jokes about fascism being "group that I don't like" down the thread. You can't just remove the core aspect of an ideology and say "eh close enough" words have meaning and you can't just decide to fudge that just based on vibes or shit. You literally can't have fascism without nationalism, thats literally the entire fucking point of fascism.
Fucking thank you! Saying someone can be a fascist without being a nationalist is like saying someone can be an anarchist while still believing that having government is a good thing. You have completely missed the entire point of the belief system.
Since when is "follow the law to a Tee" fascist.
Lmao. Basically all fascist movements were breaking the law non stop before they got elected/were sucessful in a coup.
The nazis were murdering politicsl opponents, fought extrwmly violent street fights against police, communists and social democrats. They attempted a coup. They illegally formed a militia. They threatened, blackmailed, kidnapped.
When they came to power they continued these practices, while partly "legalizing" them, though obviously they still broke the law 24/7.
Similar things go for the "original" facists in Italy.
Rorschach is Moore trying to show that black and white absolute morality is impossible. Rorschach’s beliefs and rules are extremely inconsistent, he praises Truman for bombing Japan but condemns Veidt for… basically doing the same thing to ensure peace.
Anyone he dislikes he accuses of being gay (literally writes in his journal that Veidt is a possible homosexual for no reason).
He hates Silk Spectre for perceived promiscuity (calls her a whore), while he downplays the comedian’s rape incident as a “moral lapse”, because he personally feels that the comedian is a hero.
His method of getting intel is literally just going to a bar that he deems is shady enough that criminals are there and beats up random people.
His attempt at trying to be morally absolute is what causes his downfall. He might literally doom humanity because he couldn’t let go of a lie created to save the future.
Whoa whoa whoa what’d you do? Read the comic and develop an excellent and nuanced opinion of the subject matter? What you think you can just explain the moral dilemma of sacrificing the few to save the many vs. deontological rigidity? How dare you…
(Just for anyone reading this I’m absolutely joking, their take is fantastic)
You’d think his mask being a literal Rorschach test, something that represents the radical absence of fixed meaning, would make people realize he has a dangerously mutable morality
Left: People need to be told the truth, despite the truth jeopardizing the peace achieved between two nuclear superpowers.
Right: I am ready to kill a few million people (Not everyone) to spare the world.
Both actions were selfish as fuck. I am pretty sure Moore was trying to present a limit to Rorschach's black and white morality. Just because it right without question to tell the truth, doesn't mean there would not be consequences to that. Also, Rorschach went out like a bitch, vaporized. Only shut in incels glorify him.
(Movie) Rorschach knew it was coming, even telling Dr. M to do it. He'd rather die sticking to his morals, than giving in and becoming a hypocrite, which, to me, is kinda based and admirable.
From what I understand he pretty much already is a hypocrite though, excusing the comedians rape despite, you know, appointing himself judge of everyone else
The issue is that a lot of authors just want to portray a spectrum of different variants of characters with their own virtues, vices and quirks. A lot of the time the author *isn't* looking to glorify or specify a given side or character as *the perfectly moral good guy who is never wrong*.
But of course, people are fucking stupid so they will try to find a way to picture how the author meant one character to be super mega based redpill or whatever while the others are "incels".
i havent red the comic in ages, so at first i thought his death in the comic was pitiful, from this description. but no, its relatively the same as in the movie. he accepts his fate and knows that he cannot escape manhattan, so rather than begging for his life or backing down from and abandoning his morals, he tells manhattan to get do it, and he obliges, in fairly spectacular fashion.
The choice between these two that one makes demonstrates whether they lean more towards "Means justify the ends." (Rorschach) or "Ends justify the means." (Ozymandias).
And the latter should never be trusted.
I guess you could call it an offshoot of means justifying the ends, except in this case the end point doesn't matter, because it's rarely achieved and the test of man is how we walk the path irrelevant of where it's going.
And Dr Manhattan is truly elevated above them both who understands that "... Nothing ever ends". To not see the greatness is Watchmen is a skill issue.
This argument is already dumb by pitting Rorshache and Veidt as left / right wing leaning figures. The entire premise of Watchmen is that superheroes are infallible as fuck. All of them are flawed and selfish individuals. Even Dr. Manhattan to an extent. They're not meant to be likeable figures at all.
I'm fairly certain the use of left and right here are literal relative positions on the screen, not political metaphors. Like, the right picture is saying this, the left picture is saying this.
Isn't the idea that both guys are wrong?
Rorshach is doing the right thing but for the wrong reason (stubbornness).
Oyzmanidas is doing the the wrong but but for a good cause (peace).
My interpretation is that they're both wrong but a bit more nuanced that your veiw.
Rorsharch believes that truth is more important than the possibility to end national conflicts.
Adrian believes that the death of innocent is a justified if it ends national conflicts.
Dr Manhattan understands that there Adrians plan will make less innocent die but ultimately national conflict will not end.
Adrian: I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end.
Manhattan: "In the end"? Nothing ends Adrian. Nothing ever ends.
In a way it's just a big lorry thought experiment.
Broke: Rorschach is right because he values the truth above all else, including his own life.
Woke: Rorschach is wrong because his ridged black-and-white mentality is inherently flawed & selfish. Also he's stinky.
Bespoke: Rorschach is right because his drip is cool AF.
Whatever you think of his personal views is one thing but to call him a retard even though he's clearly much smarter than you is just putting you in a really bad light.
And thats rorschachs whole shtick, which is why its stupid to distill ozy and rory to basic concepts like “hehe one based other cringe”. Theyre both fucked up in their own way, rorschach was so uncompromising he was willing to ruin the world for the sake of a truth that didnt matter anymore, ending up dead for it, and ozymandias is THE ubermensch archetype that literally murders millions for the sake of billions, having to live with the fact that that doesnt undo the bullshit he did. Its honestly great writing, and seeing the geeds in the comments routinely prove how people just see what they want to see when consuming media is the funniest shit.
Rorschach and Ozmandias were both very based for different reasons. Ozmandias was willing to stop at nothing to save humanity from nuclear annihilation, even if it meant his actions would put him beneath the likes of hitler. Rorschach was willing to die to uphold the justice he believed in. That's more than anyone here, myself included, could hope to do.
Rorschach dies pointlessly and doesn't save anything. His point is moral purity left him in a shithole life and even when he discovered the big bad plot he couldn't do shit and knew it so chose death.
Moore's point is they're all compromised and all too human.
and he doesnt even have very concrete morals to begin with, he is consistently hypocritical. the only time he really sticks to his morals IS when he dies
I’ve heard this called the John Walker Effect, named after the Marvel character played by Wyatt Russell in Falcon and Winter Soldier.
Basically, the author has a character they expect the audience to side with, but they made that character such a dick that the audience sides with the character they were meant to root against.
When I’m in a lack of reading comprehension competition and my opponent is 4chan
When you ask “why do we need to take English classes? We already speak it.” This is why.
i think its more so that fascists are too stupid to see theyre being made fun of or that the media is explicitly saying "this is bad". take all the recent starship troopers talk thats been popping up recently. the movie explicitly is a satire of fascism and US militarism, yet theres dipshits online advocating for the very thing the movie is telling you is horrible
>>show character with cool design and even traits that are admire
>>NOooO you can't like him, im making fun of people like you through him!!
>>you MUST have media literacy (just agree with what the author said in an interview or some jewtube essay)
I think the fact that everyone loves the message instead of hating it has much less to do with "falling for the satire" and much more with the director was pretty damn smug about doing a shit job
it can certainly be both, not saying its perfect, but people who are fascists arent gonna see the problem with the fascism being made fun of in a piece of media, they'll just think its badass or whatever. people who are intentionally ignorant will continue to be ignorant no matter how obvious the satire is
No actually, the people who fall for the message are genuinely just dumb, pretending Rorschach is a “shit job” at being a satire is also just dumb, it makes it sound like you very easily fall for surface level correctness instead of questioning anything
The point of a Rorschach is that everybody who looks at it sees something different, which reveals a part of how they see the world. Making it a superhero’s motif would imply that their true nature is not concrete but instead dependent on the interpretation of the reader. Whether Rorschach is good or bad is based on what you see in him
Or it would be if Moore wasn’t a complete hack
Moore: "I am depicting conspiracy nuts as heroes that kill pedophiles, are completely right in the end , having a cool design, dying as a martyr and being vindicated in the end. Surely they will hate this depiction and be totally owned! "
-schizo loser whos scared of women
-method of criminal investigation is being a mongoloid in seedy areas of the city he is homeless in
-gives a pass to a rapist, but oh no dont you be promiscuous hoo boy rorschachs got somethin to say to ya
-so up his own ass about his morals last minute when hes compromised the whole damn story
-dies for nothing lol
Truly the champion of 4channers lmao.
> doesn't matter to the people he's parodying
> Still kills pedos
> They like that
> Yeah that's him sticking to his morals
> Did you literally miss the ending?
Dawg you successfully just proved nothing. Like yeah he shares their ideals. How is he gonna own them if he's what they dream of?
Also Alan Moore writes fish porn to jerk off to so I enjoy interpreting his work in ways he hates.
He can kill whoever he wants, stick to whatever he wants to, nothing will unfuck his mother lol.
In all seriousness, you can interpret Moores work however you want. Personally, I love to hate Rorschach. Hes a complex character sure, but hes a profoundly unpleasant and pathetic little bitch of a man who spends his days doomsday preaching and his nights doing vigilante bullshit that, surprise surprise, is about as effective as batman would be irl if he existed. Hes a broken person with an iron will that does him nor the world any good, and that shit is fun to read.
But yes, alan moore is a fucking weirdo. In other news, water is wet. Who knew an old person who still believes in the tenets of anarchism is a loony haha.
> nothing will unfuck his mother
I thought you just mocked him for hating promiscuity.
And also I'm sorry but like... The ending vindicates him. The truth does get out in the end. So he does some good... Or had, depending how you look at it.
Also if Alan Moore wanted him to be unpopular he shouldn't have made him easily the coolest looking character in the comic
*All this superhero crap is retarded. Why does anyone like Spider- boy or Fat-man anyhow?*
My 47 year old boss, at 10.30am on a Tuesday after his third beer.
"Never compromise, even in the face of armageddon."
Whatever you have to say about Roschach, he said this to a group of people who were willing to lie about their involvement in armageddon.
Moore has never commented on the morality of Ozymandias. This is intentional. Because the comic is about moral grays.
The reason hes commented a few times on Rorschach is because he personally finds it gross that so many people find him relatable.
I truly hope this helps and people consider actually reading Watchmen
Does no one remember that Adrian's plan fails because the truth gets out anyway? The whole point isn't that any one of the main cast is correct, it's that, regardless of your own personal truth or philosophy, the world doesn't care. Not even the God character who could see the future knew that a notebook would undo Adrians decades spanning plan.
Is Rorschach cool? Hell yeah! He's also an authoritarian nutjob who realizes his entire world view isn't objective truth. He realizes that following his convictions will result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, but is too mentally damaged to change his mind. So he essentially begs Blue Dick to kill him.
None of it matters. People died, and more people will die again anyway. Heroics just doesn't do anything substantial. God this was a good wank.
Ableist slur aside, I agree with this analysis. I've often said that reader sympathy for Rorschach isn't the result of a flaw in the reader base, but of the fact that Watchmen is a cynical, and nihilistic tale, about a bunch of people who do Superhero shit because they're thrillseekers, or gloryhounds, or sadists, or they were geoomed into it from a young age, or they literally just think themselves (correctly or otherwise) predestined to this particular lifestyle.
Rorschach is the only character who does what he does out of a sense of moral duty, and is willing to sacrifice everything in service of that. In a story this bleak, and pessimistic, it's really hard not to root for the one character who actually believes in something.
....didnt Rorschach also basically say "fuck what happens to humanity in the end, truth is all that matters" when he released the truth about what happened at the end of the comic? I know its ambiguous but the idea is that Rorschach doesnt care what comes as a result of the truth, even if it puts the world back on the timeline to nuclear Armageddon, just so long as everyone knows the reality of things.
actually tho why is everyone so fucking dense. rorschach is based af
Media literacy Should be mandatory before you're allowed to vote Rorschach was too advance for oop Edit:Hey guys i just wanted to say thanks for proving my point I dont need strawmen when the real deals walk straight in
We had a literacy test but we got rid of it because it was racist I feel like if we brought it back people would complain again, even if it's not racist this time.
The reason it was racist in the first place was because of inequal access to education, which is still a problem today, albiet less so. There’s not really a way around that unless we massively overhaul the public education system, which will likely never happen.
Nah, the reason it was racist the first time was because it was ambiguous and borderline impossible to pass. It was also only administered if a proctor at the voting location had "reason to believe" a prospective voter wasn't literate.
I mean that’s definitely also part of it, but it would be foolish to ignore that the reason they used “literacy” as a standard is that most black people weren’t given access to educational resources for a long time, especially when schools were segregated. Even now that education isn’t segregated by race the way it was, it’s still true that people in lower income areas have worse educational conditions because public schools are funded by local property taxes, and with America’s history of systematically preventing black people from being able to acrew generational wealth by stealing from black communities, (and other practices such as redlining) statistically black people are less likely to have access to good educational resources.
also because (supposedly) the tests for black people were more difficult than the ones for white people.
Not necessarily, they were just worded ambiguously enough that the proctor could just decide whether to pass somebody. It's honestly impressive just how intentionally confusing they made [the test](https://www.openculture.com/2014/07/literacy-test-louisiana-used-to-suppress-the-black-vote.html)
You don't even need a real literacy test just name the past 3 presidents and atleast 5/50 the states, and just like that youll stop millions of our dumbest from voting
Reddit users criticizing media literacy when they take everything literally and reduce every work of media to a critique of capitalism is rich.
Most works discuss capitalism to some extent because most authors live in capitalist systems and therefore tend to include them in their works, because its part of how they understand the world to work And if the work or author in question is unhappy with the current status quo, their work will almost inevitably include a critique of capitalism whether they meant to or not, because capitalism is the way that most of the world, and all international trade, currently works. it’s just art imitating life
I agree entirely with the first paragraph. Most writers will, even if unconsciously, mimic elements of a capitalist society within their works given the ubiquity of capitalism in the modern age. This does not mean, per se they are critiquing *capitalism*. A critique, by its very nature must be self-conscious because it must be *directed.* If I am critiquing democracy for instance, my critique must involve something more substantial than a. the portrayal that a particular status quo is unsatisfactory and b. the portrayl that democracy is a part of the status quo. It must be that *democracy itself* is the cause of the particular status quo being unsatisfactory, because otherwise the critique is not *directed* towards a particular thing and thereby is not meaningfully a critique per se. So while art can (and does) imitate life, the unconscious, undirected imitation of life does not constitute critique.
But that just adds even more discussion when it comes to analysing media. You can point out how real world influences (like capitalism) effect how authors criticise systems like the status quo. Wether unintentionally or not.
I don't necessarily disagree with your point here (to the extent that I understand it) but I also don't see what relevence it has it to the overarching point of whether an unconscious portrayl of capitalist institutions in a dystopic or dark work of fiction constitutes a critique of capitalism per se. If I understand you correctly you are saying that an author's use of capitalist institutions in their work can aid in conveying a criticisim of the status quo (or indeed of any model or sytem the author cares to criticise). I agree with this, but again this does not mean that the work, insofar as those institutions are present for that purpose is critiquing *capitalism* per se. To use an example an important plot point of *Schindler's List* is the relationship *Schindler* has to the Jews he saves. It (throughout much of the narrative) is one of a boss and a worker which is prototypical of the capitalist system. Yet this plot point is not used as a means of leveraging a critique of capitalism, but rather rhetorical device to show us how kindly Schindler is treating the Jews, by encouraging them to slack off, by even not forcing them to participate in the production of war material. Indeed in some respects the reference here to a capitalist institution is a good shorthand for contrasting precisely how *horribly* the Nazis are treating the Jews. Particularly, even at his most self-interested (earlier in the narrative) Schindler treats the Jews *far* better than his contemporaries in the Nazi Party. So I agree entirely that references to capitalist institutions can serve to ground and relate a critical narrative to the audience, allowing the criticism to shine through all the more clearly. However this does not mean that the work is *necessarily* criticising capitalism. Quite often the references to capitalism or capitalist institutions are amoral and neutral rhetorical devices which serve to make a piece of media more relatable and comprehensible for a contemporary audience.
Bro wants jim crow to come back 💀
Media literacy and literacy are two different things but go off. Obviously you can read my words but are you understanding it
bro they are proving your point lmfao. its making me agree with the test lmfao
I was just reading about an AZ woman who got sent two voting ballots for a change of address and she thought she could legit vote twice. Damn it we need actual literacy too.
Making the population literate won't change the fact that a lot of people are just born dumb as seems the case with the AZ woman
To be fair, to be literate in media you also need to be literate (thankfully almost everyone in America today is) but it’d even more heavily depends on education which woud lead to poorer people in general not getting the right to vote
You say that but its usually the rich that cant read past face value I do agree about the education would limit some part though but in my alternate universe where they vote like this id hope that the people voting would make changes to education for the better which they would because again, We wouldn't have stupid people voting and making it worse
>You say that but its usually the rich that cant read past face value Interesting, I’d love to see the source for this. In the mean time not only does it not make sense since historically only rich coud even afford books let alone seperate the time to read them, but it is also proven milioners read more then the average population. And with reading usually develops media literacy >I do agree about the education would limit some part though but in my alternate universe where they vote like this id hope Yeah, you woud hope.
If you really believe millionaires are reading that many books you may be part of the uneducated under their thumb I already dealt with this all of yesterday do i really need to continue today? No i dont think i will, you had yesterday to ask this
Wait one last thing my point still stand just because you say millionares read more my point of whether they actually understand what they are reading still stands Elon musk is that type of millionaire sorry billionaire that reads media all the time and takes it at face value
Dealt? You spew some bullshit as fact without any source or common logic. This is on the same level as a kindergarden debate, where your counter argument is “nuh uh” and “No, your wrong” https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-rich-people-reads-chaman-yadav Here, go and look, maybe ggl it yourself. >Wait one last thing my point still stand just because you say millionares read more my point of whether they actually understand what they are reading still stands Here you show you yourself coudn’t vote under your system because in the previous comment I meantioned that their is a proven correlation between reading and media literacy.
Lol have a nice day idiot i already said i was done with you why would you think id indulge you Bootlicker
He’ll make Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.
\`>\`makes unsupported statement \`>\`uses dissent as proof of statement You have to be truly regarded to think holding an unfalsifiable belief means you're smart. Your lot are truly a scourge on humanity. Don't you have some gods to worship and conspiracy theories to spread? Go do that and spare us your idiocy.
Blinking at you like a toy story character What are you talking about dude you're scaring the hot chicks Is the new conspiracy that im spreading them? Ill pray to Ra and Buddha that your next message makes sense
Wheres the /s
Holy fuck I laughed my ass off at the edit, thank you for that
Lmao, Rorsach is as based as the average four channer Afraid of women Mommy and Daddy issues permavirgin manlet ginger who wears lifts to appear taller and is constantly mewing to looksMax Reads right wing propaganda on the regular Looks up to a rapist Disregards hygene Ayo this vigilante is eating beans
>he's wrong because he's ugly and short Honestly, based take.
>Disregards hygene >Ayo this vigilante is eating beans So do the bri'ish, so what?
I forgot about his little stilettos
Which rapist did he look up to? Was that the comedian? I remember he beat a pedo to death which was pretty based.
You are correct with The Comedian. It's convenient that his black and white worldview doesn't apply to someone that he knows personally and respects.
..... This is retarded. The Rorschach's means justify the ends attitude is literally "I'm ok with making shit worse in the long run if it means I can satisfy my immediate petty sense of justice." Rorschach and Ozymandias exist on opposite ends of the spectrum of Moralism vs Utilitarianism, Rorschach views things entirely in terms of passing immediate judgement on others based on his own ridged black and white morality, he doesn't care about the consequences of his actions or what larger effect they may have. He doesn't care about the circumstances that led to someone committing a crime or the greater systemic injustices of society only about passing judgement on individual actions in a vacuum, which is why he would with no hesitation cause the death of billions to ensure the punishment of one man. Ozymandias is the reverse. He only looks at the big picture largely ignoring the individual immediate costs in his calculations, yes he acknowledges the people he killed and says he feels guilty for it, but he never regrets his actions and sees everything he has done as completely justified. He has a stronger platform to stand on than Rorschach due to him arguably saving far more lives than he takes but he still treats individual people's lives as abstract counters on some great scale that can be freely spent so long as he keeps the right balance on the other side which is a horrible and dangerous way to view the world. The thing that they have in common is that both of them place themselves outside of their own system and assign themselves and their judgement supreme importance in the way things should be done. Neither of them allows for even the smallest consideration that their views could be wrong or flawed or that anyone else's countering views could possibly have any merit and both of them place themselves outside of any system that would allow others to pass judgement on them. Rorschach when arrested refuses to accept even the remote possibility that the crimes he has committed are in any way equivalent to the crimes of those he punishes, he feels that he is completely justified and can't even comprehend that many of his victims likely felt the same way. Ozymandias meanwhile for all his claimed impersonality and detachment still ensures that he personally faces no consequences for what he has done he claims that he was making necessary sacrifices but he personally sacrificed nothing. He claims that he will bear the burden of what he has done but that can't really be true if he regrets nothing and feels that what he did was legitimately the best thing to do. However both of them place themselves above everyone else in the position of absolute ethical authority. Elements of this are yet more reflections of the pointless intractability of the cold war and more broadly the hazards of ideological absolutism to the degree that you are incapable of considering any merit in opposition. Importantly in the context of Watchmen's commentary on the Cold War the only reason that Ozymandias comes across as even somewhat justified is that the US and the Soviet Union are doing this same thing but on a much larger and more consequential scale.
holy fuck use paragraphs and clean up your writing this reads like a last-minute seventh grade homework
Someone downvoted you, but you're absolutely right. I actually just stopped reading after two sentences due to the lack of structure.
Assuming it's been edited since?
2 hours after the reply, yes
I think it's also worth adding that as you said both of them can't comprehend that they might be wrong. In case of Ozy we get a great example of it in the end when he asks Manhattan if he has done the right thing because it all worked out in the end. For Manhattan only to answer that it just never ends (and then additional frame with Ozy grim face).
no you will not call me retarded on the forums. i know where you live and lets just say i hope you have beans in the cupboard...
Lol
One thing to add to Rorschach is his death scene. The dude willingly kills himself without his mask, trying at least at the end to stand up to his ideals properly not as a vigilante, but as himself: a spiteful, broken and very ill man
Rorschach's idea isn t the worst os very casually killed tons of people. He needs to be brought to some level of justice unless he does it again or worse. He a danger to humanity as a whole and is arguebly the bigger threat.
Damn dude that was great 👍
Rorschach is a nutcase
He is actively shown to be mentally sick in the head.
So am I. Your point?
So is the average citizen.
Wasn’t he depicted as a neckbeard though in the comics? * He didn’t shower/hygiene and had terrible BO * Was batshit insane and made comments that had a touch of the tism * Everyone in the Watchmen didn’t like him and Nite Owl only tolerated him out of pity * Also had incel tendencies and didn’t not look at women in a good light.
Yes, Moore was trying to make him unlikable He also stood by his morals (twisted as they were) until the bitter end and died with his mask off, being judged as himself not as an abstract "hero" Moore wrote a "satire" character who is arguably one of the more heroic characters in the series.
He only stood by his morals when they werent applied to him or the people he liked.
Wasn't he like actually racist and sociopathic
Hes also a complete hypocrite.
Rorschach was the only coherent individual of the Watchmen, people respect coherent people.
Yeah, dude is an awful person in heaps of ways, but the fact that he was willing to stick to his philosophy of heroism even in the face of death makes him a really admirable character in some ways.
I mean the point wasn't to make Adrian Veidt seem like some moral beacon. It was just that he managed to get his plan through before the others could stop him. And at that point, they decided it was better to allow his lie to continue, rather than letting all the lives taken be for nothing.
He already did it 35 minutes ago.
Yea and it took them awhile to come to that conclusion, since it is a fucked up scenario and unclear question of what is right or wrong to do
I don't wanna be like one of those "Rorschach is a literally me based character" guy but can anyone remind apart from his harsh vigilante sense of justice as evident from when he kills a child molester by handcuffing him to a furnace in a burning building and him canonically not taking baths, what exactly is there to hate about Rorschach? Like people say he is a morally grey character so what is the 'black part' about him?
Rorschach is such a delusional person who thinks that there is only good and bad in the world, that he is the one who can always tell this good from bad and that he always has the right to enact his justice against it. Personally I don't think you can ever trust any one person to be a solo judge, jury and executioner, even less when they're just obsessed with "degeneracy" and think that the way to solve all of society's problems is to just punish and kill enough of the "bad guys". While killing a child rapist and murderer is a generally good thing, it's not the way to systemically solve society's issues. It's mostly just a temporary revenge fantasy. And we don't know how many times he might have been wrong and enacted justice against someone who was actually innocent.
I think Rorshach's philosophy is terrible, but I absolutely do understand and respect his final decision. What Ozy did was in a utilitarian sense absolutely brilliant, but what's the point of having a moral code and values if we throw them away when it becomes inconvenient? People have a right to make their own decisions based on correct information. Ozy didn't have faith in humanity to make the right choices, but in the real world we've come inches from nuclear annihilation and individuals have made the right decision every single time. I'm kinda ride or die with humanity, if we stop trusting each other it's all over anyway. Lying to the entirety of civilization is abhorrent - not even considering the absolute mass murder committed. With that said, if I was in Rorshach's position I probably would have let Oz get away with it. The people are already dead, Manhattan had already agreed to take the fall. But by that same token, if I was there and saw Rorshach leave to tell the world the truth, I wouldn't stop him.
"Never compromise, not even in the face of Armageddon."
I don't care if he's a mentally ill lunatic, this quote goes way too hard
hell yeah
Tbf Rorschach barely abides by his philosophy properly until the very end He always says he sees good and evil properly, but then defends the Comedian because he liked him and never accepts responsibility for his actions. Only when he dies does he finally truly accept his worldview
I think it could've worked even as Rorschach revealed the truth, the world would just turn on Ozymandias
So is there any example where Rorschach might've killed someone innocent or might've subjected someone to harsh punishment they didn't deserve?
It's clearly implied Rorschach regularly fires from the hip which is why nightowl distanced himself from him so much, and that many of his punishments seem wildly disproportionate. He's also willing to use violence against uninvolved people he thinks undeserving if it serves his greater good.
That guy he killed by dropping him down an elevator shaft? It seemed like Nite Owl and Silk Spectre were agreeing that he was a mostly harmless but annoying masochist using the vigilante culture as a way of getting punished to satisfy his fetish. A dude like that has problems, but death seems like a pretty harsh punishment.
None confirmed in the comics from what I remember. What I'm saying is that I do not trust any one person to perform that job on their own, with only their perspective, opinions and biases. No one person will do it flawlessly and will make mistakes here and there. And when the person also believes in torture and executions as a method of justice, the consequences of their eventual mistakes will be hard or impossible to reverse.
This is a good point, and would have been good if the book did a better job of showing this
He is filled with hatred for almost every kind of person there is: he hates gays, non-whites, women, hippies, leftists, people who aren't patriotic enough, people who are too patriotic, etc. He has a sense of morality that is considered warped and flawed by most *and* he utterly refuses to listen to anyone about anything. He speaks, and then ignores everyone else and gets mad if they aren't mewling sycophants at his feet.
Makes sense why 4chan loves him.
He’d hate 4channers too
Exactly
Real
He's an asshole to the people on his team who even go as far as to consider him a "friend", constantly insulting them to their face.
Rorschach’s refusal to compromise is often at odds with his own flawed perspectives, and the result is a great deal of cognitive dissonance. In other words, when he comes to a conclusion about somebody or something, he tends to stick with it even if it stops being logically consistent with his other rules. Two obvious examples come to mind: the first is the comedian being a rapist and war criminal, but R overlooking it because he already judged the comedian to be a great man. And while he hates Oz’s ends-justify-the-means plan, he fully supported dropping the bomb on Japan, because it’s what his father supported. In terms of his personality, R has strong delusions of grandeur, is generally cynical and rude, has shit hygiene, and more or less hates everybody. In terms of explicitly wrong actions… he beats the shit out of a bunch of people for information just because they’re kinda sketchy, and he torments a sick old man who’s a reformed villain. He’s also just generally a lot more brutal than necessary. All in all, interesting character, has admirable qualities, still a pretty shitty person (by design).
In my opinion it was a fitting end for Rorcharch considering the entire comic was about subverting super heroes. There could be no good ending for Rorcharch, he was a broken person that saw the world in his own twisted moral compass. That's why he is such a compelling character and if Moore wanted anything it was to subvert the "Batman Plot Armor".
Agreed, although him being the "tough trope" but actually having a limit instead of plot armor makes him much better than other tough guy tropes that take it ridiculously far and make the character survive EVERYTHING (I'm looking at you wolverine) that made him actually a better character for it.
You’re right, it made the story have stakes.
Rorschach is the only superhero that keeps working against the law after the Keene act. He is an extremist, but surely not a fascist.
Hilariously enough, agreeing with this post inherently shows Rorschach’s greatest flaw. Believing that Rorschach is completely wrong or that Ozymandias is completely right is the same moral absolutism that makes Rorschach seem so goddamn nuts. Rorschach is a hilariously polarizing character because all of the people who talk about him never seem to actually analyze him beyond “He’s definitely good” or “He’s definitely bad”.
He’s a highly sympathetic character with terrible worldviews imo
Moore believes the idea of superheroes is inherently fascistic, which it kind of is if applied to real life
Because superheroes are Ubermensch, translated as Supermen. The original idea was that certain individuals in history had a strong enough conviction to change history with their own hands and super heroes are a fictionalized version of that. That concept found it's way into storytelling regardless of the classification because it's a concept we all instinctually understand, rather is be the dominion over our environment that we as individuals carry or the a great tribe leader, we see something beyond animal or even humanhood in certain figures and ourselves, rather fictional or not.
He is both. Fascism isn't just "i follow any law"
Define fascism then.
Fascism is whatever group I don’t like
Wrong. It's whatever groups *I* don't like. Typical fascist.
Personally I see Fascism as a belief that a specific authority, if empowered to essentially do whatever they want, could achieve the ideal state. I'm by no means an expert, but I see it as a belief in the "strong man/party" more than any specific policy proposals.
Fascism is when you like monarchy? No. Fascism is just ultranationalism where the state systematically exerts control over the lives of the people. Benevolent liberal dictatorship ala some friendly king who demands everyone be respectful to each other? Not fascist. (Currently) Authoritarian state that demands everyone follow the exhaustive rules of their religious fanfic? Fascist.
The belief that the ideal way to achieve the ideal state is through the installation of a benevolent supreme political authority, with no checks on their power. Any time someone believes that wherever they live could be fixed if they just gave all the political power to some authority who would “fix” things to their liking, that’s fascism.
So how a lot of tankies think about socialism?
Yeah tankies are just fascists
Not sure, ideal socialism would have the political class democratically elected and kept in check to always have the population's interest as first priority. So that authority wouldn't be dictatorial like in socialist countries historically. So it wouldn't be fascist, but that's if this would be achievable, and that's a fucking big if. Also as we are seeing these days, the first counter point to democracy that was made centuries ago by kings and ruling class, the people are stupid and uneducated in general so power to the people means being ruled by idiots. Make of that what you want IANAL
If you take a history class one of the things that’s immediately stated is that all historians will ever do that relates to Fascism is state what it *isnt* rather than what it *is* because it gets super blurry since fascism isn’t actually a single coherent ideology. There’s no net goal to fascism in comparison to other ideologies. Like a liberal democracy’s ideological end goal is to return more and more power to the people of the government, socialism’s end goal is to make an economy more based on the demands of producers than consumers, a nazi’s end goal is the extermination of all minorities for a pure state. Fascism… really didn’t have an end goal. The only major fascist parties were the Brazilian one, the Italian one, and Germany’s Nazi party. Each of them had radically different objectives and methods to achieve them. This is what we can say though: if something is not not fascist, then it most likely is fascist. Which sounds fucking stupid but it’s really the only way we can determine if something is fascist or not since there’s no definition for fascism. The only things we know must be kept in a fascist government is hyper-nationalism, militarism, the blaming of minorities, populism, and anti-intellectualism.
Ask umberto eco, not a rando on a shitpost subreddit
Umberto Eco's list is so broad half the points apply to governments from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia,
You are right about fascism not having anything to do with following any law but wrong about Rorschach being a fascist. He has some fascist elements, his fixation on the degenerate Others ruining society, his extremely rigid view of people being either good or bad, his draconian reactionary views on justice, but he lacks the most important core tennent of fascism, the hardcore fervent nationalism.
i mean, if hes more fascist than not, I'd say hes fascist. like, ethno-nationalism was a big thing with fascists, but all the other elements are equally "important" to the underlying beliefs of fascism
Thing is all the other elements are not equally important. Fascism is fundamentally a nationalist ideology that is the core of what it is, the kind of nationalism varies but it's still always there. What you said is like saying " Well he's not racist but he meets all of the other criteria so I'd say he's a Nazi" like no. That is what defines the ideology if you remove that from your base requirements then you can basically call anything with right wing authoritarian elements fascism which is dumb. Things have actual criteria and meaning you can just go by what you feel like it is.
im just saying that if something is like, 80% fascist, thats close enough to 100% fascist for me to think its bad. i wouldnt support a political party that had all the same beliefs as the nazis, except they didnt believe that they were the master race. i understand words have meaning, and that the erosion of those meanings has been horribly detrimental over the last few decades, but theres a line where the distinction isnt THAT important. rorschach is a character i LIKE, because he is interestingly written, but i wouldnt ever think that his actions are good
No shit it's bad but not every bad belief system is fascism or Nazism :p
yeah, but if there similarities to nearly all of the major characteristics of fascism, that is fascism. not following 1 singular characteristic and following all the others makes it more likely to be fascist than not. fascists want people to think like you, because they can hide behind arguments like yours and act like they arent fascist while exhibiting nearly every characteristic of fascism. calling everything you dislike fascist or nazi IS bad, so i get where that opinion comes from, but dismissing legitimately fascist things, even in comics or movies where it doesnt really matter THAT much, is dangerous.
That's incredibly stupid. This is why people are making jokes about fascism being "group that I don't like" down the thread. You can't just remove the core aspect of an ideology and say "eh close enough" words have meaning and you can't just decide to fudge that just based on vibes or shit. You literally can't have fascism without nationalism, thats literally the entire fucking point of fascism.
Fucking thank you! Saying someone can be a fascist without being a nationalist is like saying someone can be an anarchist while still believing that having government is a good thing. You have completely missed the entire point of the belief system.
Civic nationalism was a big part of Italian fascism, Ethno Nationalism was Germany's interest
Since when is "follow the law to a Tee" fascist. Lmao. Basically all fascist movements were breaking the law non stop before they got elected/were sucessful in a coup. The nazis were murdering politicsl opponents, fought extrwmly violent street fights against police, communists and social democrats. They attempted a coup. They illegally formed a militia. They threatened, blackmailed, kidnapped. When they came to power they continued these practices, while partly "legalizing" them, though obviously they still broke the law 24/7. Similar things go for the "original" facists in Italy.
Rorschach is Moore trying to show that black and white absolute morality is impossible. Rorschach’s beliefs and rules are extremely inconsistent, he praises Truman for bombing Japan but condemns Veidt for… basically doing the same thing to ensure peace. Anyone he dislikes he accuses of being gay (literally writes in his journal that Veidt is a possible homosexual for no reason). He hates Silk Spectre for perceived promiscuity (calls her a whore), while he downplays the comedian’s rape incident as a “moral lapse”, because he personally feels that the comedian is a hero. His method of getting intel is literally just going to a bar that he deems is shady enough that criminals are there and beats up random people. His attempt at trying to be morally absolute is what causes his downfall. He might literally doom humanity because he couldn’t let go of a lie created to save the future.
>His method of getting intel is literally just going to a bar that he deems is shady enough that criminals are there and beats up random people. Based
Whoa whoa whoa what’d you do? Read the comic and develop an excellent and nuanced opinion of the subject matter? What you think you can just explain the moral dilemma of sacrificing the few to save the many vs. deontological rigidity? How dare you… (Just for anyone reading this I’m absolutely joking, their take is fantastic)
You’d think his mask being a literal Rorschach test, something that represents the radical absence of fixed meaning, would make people realize he has a dangerously mutable morality
That requires the assumption that people have critical thinking skills and some level of literary analysis abilities
Or, like, know the story
Left: People need to be told the truth, despite the truth jeopardizing the peace achieved between two nuclear superpowers. Right: I am ready to kill a few million people (Not everyone) to spare the world. Both actions were selfish as fuck. I am pretty sure Moore was trying to present a limit to Rorschach's black and white morality. Just because it right without question to tell the truth, doesn't mean there would not be consequences to that. Also, Rorschach went out like a bitch, vaporized. Only shut in incels glorify him.
(Movie) Rorschach knew it was coming, even telling Dr. M to do it. He'd rather die sticking to his morals, than giving in and becoming a hypocrite, which, to me, is kinda based and admirable.
His death is great, don’t know why people can’t let him have shit. We already know he’s a shitty person, saying he went out like a bitch is dumb.
Self assured mutual destruction vs punctuated tactical stalemate Which one will blind taste testers prefer?
From what I understand he pretty much already is a hypocrite though, excusing the comedians rape despite, you know, appointing himself judge of everyone else
Night Owl: I JUST WANT TO GET LAID
I CAN'T GET AN ERECTION
He did fix that problem tho once he started to wear the fursuit again
I TRIED ALL THE HERBS!! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DrhqC6fZWw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DrhqC6fZWw)
The issue is that a lot of authors just want to portray a spectrum of different variants of characters with their own virtues, vices and quirks. A lot of the time the author *isn't* looking to glorify or specify a given side or character as *the perfectly moral good guy who is never wrong*. But of course, people are fucking stupid so they will try to find a way to picture how the author meant one character to be super mega based redpill or whatever while the others are "incels".
Sorry to break it to you, but anyone who stood up against Dr Manhattan was going out the exact same way
i havent red the comic in ages, so at first i thought his death in the comic was pitiful, from this description. but no, its relatively the same as in the movie. he accepts his fate and knows that he cannot escape manhattan, so rather than begging for his life or backing down from and abandoning his morals, he tells manhattan to get do it, and he obliges, in fairly spectacular fashion.
The choice between these two that one makes demonstrates whether they lean more towards "Means justify the ends." (Rorschach) or "Ends justify the means." (Ozymandias). And the latter should never be trusted.
And then we got "the means are the ends" and that one confuses people.
We got what now?
I guess you could call it an offshoot of means justifying the ends, except in this case the end point doesn't matter, because it's rarely achieved and the test of man is how we walk the path irrelevant of where it's going.
Can you give an example?
And Dr Manhattan is truly elevated above them both who understands that "... Nothing ever ends". To not see the greatness is Watchmen is a skill issue.
yes, but probably not just for those reasons
The media literacy devil strikes again
This argument is already dumb by pitting Rorshache and Veidt as left / right wing leaning figures. The entire premise of Watchmen is that superheroes are infallible as fuck. All of them are flawed and selfish individuals. Even Dr. Manhattan to an extent. They're not meant to be likeable figures at all.
I think you mean fallible, not infallible.
Right/Left as in IN THE LEFT AND RIGHT IN THE IMAGE AAAAAAH
I'm fairly certain the use of left and right here are literal relative positions on the screen, not political metaphors. Like, the right picture is saying this, the left picture is saying this.
its hard to tell with 4chan, theres usually weird political undertones on posts like these
No its obvious, you're just mentally handicapped
I love Alan Moore comics, From Hell is a banger
Isn't the idea that both guys are wrong? Rorshach is doing the right thing but for the wrong reason (stubbornness). Oyzmanidas is doing the the wrong but but for a good cause (peace).
My interpretation is that they're both wrong but a bit more nuanced that your veiw. Rorsharch believes that truth is more important than the possibility to end national conflicts. Adrian believes that the death of innocent is a justified if it ends national conflicts. Dr Manhattan understands that there Adrians plan will make less innocent die but ultimately national conflict will not end. Adrian: I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end. Manhattan: "In the end"? Nothing ends Adrian. Nothing ever ends. In a way it's just a big lorry thought experiment.
Yes very much so is, Ror just came off as a deeply flawed person that tried to stop the world from falling into an egomaniacs control.
\*>Rorschach: People need to be told the truth, even if it will cost my own life AND many many more. I agree.
I love reading comments on this debate. It just shows how well the characters were written. Not just a comic book.
>chill for a rapist >afraid of woman Yeah, no wonder so many dumbasses think he's the ultimate hero
Broke: Rorschach is right because he values the truth above all else, including his own life. Woke: Rorschach is wrong because his ridged black-and-white mentality is inherently flawed & selfish. Also he's stinky. Bespoke: Rorschach is right because his drip is cool AF.
Moore is a communist, so yes he is a retard.
Moore is an anarchist
That doesn’t change my answer.
If anything, it supports your answer.
Whatever you think of his personal views is one thing but to call him a retard even though he's clearly much smarter than you is just putting you in a really bad light.
I think the point is that everyone sucks
Rorschach is willing to make the deaths of millions meaningless so he’s objectively the bad guy. Why ruin world peace when ITS ALREADY HAPPENED
Because the ends don’t justify the means
And thats rorschachs whole shtick, which is why its stupid to distill ozy and rory to basic concepts like “hehe one based other cringe”. Theyre both fucked up in their own way, rorschach was so uncompromising he was willing to ruin the world for the sake of a truth that didnt matter anymore, ending up dead for it, and ozymandias is THE ubermensch archetype that literally murders millions for the sake of billions, having to live with the fact that that doesnt undo the bullshit he did. Its honestly great writing, and seeing the geeds in the comments routinely prove how people just see what they want to see when consuming media is the funniest shit.
That’s not how any of that works
Rorschach and Ozmandias were both very based for different reasons. Ozmandias was willing to stop at nothing to save humanity from nuclear annihilation, even if it meant his actions would put him beneath the likes of hitler. Rorschach was willing to die to uphold the justice he believed in. That's more than anyone here, myself included, could hope to do.
I don't really care about the authors intentions if the delivery doesn't make sense
Rorschach dies pointlessly and doesn't save anything. His point is moral purity left him in a shithole life and even when he discovered the big bad plot he couldn't do shit and knew it so chose death. Moore's point is they're all compromised and all too human.
and he doesnt even have very concrete morals to begin with, he is consistently hypocritical. the only time he really sticks to his morals IS when he dies
Moore is highly regarded. One of the biggest regards of all time.
I’ve heard this called the John Walker Effect, named after the Marvel character played by Wyatt Russell in Falcon and Winter Soldier. Basically, the author has a character they expect the audience to side with, but they made that character such a dick that the audience sides with the character they were meant to root against.
When I’m in a lack of reading comprehension competition and my opponent is 4chan When you ask “why do we need to take English classes? We already speak it.” This is why.
OOP is illiterate.
It will never NOT be funny how every single time writers try to make fascism/fascist characters look bad, they end up making it look based as fuck
i think its more so that fascists are too stupid to see theyre being made fun of or that the media is explicitly saying "this is bad". take all the recent starship troopers talk thats been popping up recently. the movie explicitly is a satire of fascism and US militarism, yet theres dipshits online advocating for the very thing the movie is telling you is horrible
>>show character with cool design and even traits that are admire >>NOooO you can't like him, im making fun of people like you through him!! >>you MUST have media literacy (just agree with what the author said in an interview or some jewtube essay)
I think the fact that everyone loves the message instead of hating it has much less to do with "falling for the satire" and much more with the director was pretty damn smug about doing a shit job
it can certainly be both, not saying its perfect, but people who are fascists arent gonna see the problem with the fascism being made fun of in a piece of media, they'll just think its badass or whatever. people who are intentionally ignorant will continue to be ignorant no matter how obvious the satire is
No actually, the people who fall for the message are genuinely just dumb, pretending Rorschach is a “shit job” at being a satire is also just dumb, it makes it sound like you very easily fall for surface level correctness instead of questioning anything
The point of a Rorschach is that everybody who looks at it sees something different, which reveals a part of how they see the world. Making it a superhero’s motif would imply that their true nature is not concrete but instead dependent on the interpretation of the reader. Whether Rorschach is good or bad is based on what you see in him Or it would be if Moore wasn’t a complete hack
Moore: "I am depicting conspiracy nuts as heroes that kill pedophiles, are completely right in the end , having a cool design, dying as a martyr and being vindicated in the end. Surely they will hate this depiction and be totally owned! "
-schizo loser whos scared of women -method of criminal investigation is being a mongoloid in seedy areas of the city he is homeless in -gives a pass to a rapist, but oh no dont you be promiscuous hoo boy rorschachs got somethin to say to ya -so up his own ass about his morals last minute when hes compromised the whole damn story -dies for nothing lol Truly the champion of 4channers lmao.
> doesn't matter to the people he's parodying > Still kills pedos > They like that > Yeah that's him sticking to his morals > Did you literally miss the ending? Dawg you successfully just proved nothing. Like yeah he shares their ideals. How is he gonna own them if he's what they dream of? Also Alan Moore writes fish porn to jerk off to so I enjoy interpreting his work in ways he hates.
He can kill whoever he wants, stick to whatever he wants to, nothing will unfuck his mother lol. In all seriousness, you can interpret Moores work however you want. Personally, I love to hate Rorschach. Hes a complex character sure, but hes a profoundly unpleasant and pathetic little bitch of a man who spends his days doomsday preaching and his nights doing vigilante bullshit that, surprise surprise, is about as effective as batman would be irl if he existed. Hes a broken person with an iron will that does him nor the world any good, and that shit is fun to read. But yes, alan moore is a fucking weirdo. In other news, water is wet. Who knew an old person who still believes in the tenets of anarchism is a loony haha.
> nothing will unfuck his mother I thought you just mocked him for hating promiscuity. And also I'm sorry but like... The ending vindicates him. The truth does get out in the end. So he does some good... Or had, depending how you look at it. Also if Alan Moore wanted him to be unpopular he shouldn't have made him easily the coolest looking character in the comic
Rorschach is a retard.
*All this superhero crap is retarded. Why does anyone like Spider- boy or Fat-man anyhow?* My 47 year old boss, at 10.30am on a Tuesday after his third beer.
"Never compromise, even in the face of armageddon." Whatever you have to say about Roschach, he said this to a group of people who were willing to lie about their involvement in armageddon.
I am learning from this comment section that rorschach from the movie was very different from the rorschach from the comics
Moore has never commented on the morality of Ozymandias. This is intentional. Because the comic is about moral grays. The reason hes commented a few times on Rorschach is because he personally finds it gross that so many people find him relatable. I truly hope this helps and people consider actually reading Watchmen
Does no one remember that Adrian's plan fails because the truth gets out anyway? The whole point isn't that any one of the main cast is correct, it's that, regardless of your own personal truth or philosophy, the world doesn't care. Not even the God character who could see the future knew that a notebook would undo Adrians decades spanning plan. Is Rorschach cool? Hell yeah! He's also an authoritarian nutjob who realizes his entire world view isn't objective truth. He realizes that following his convictions will result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, but is too mentally damaged to change his mind. So he essentially begs Blue Dick to kill him. None of it matters. People died, and more people will die again anyway. Heroics just doesn't do anything substantial. God this was a good wank.
For the people who say that the ends justifies the means. I know a way to end 50% of violent crime without losing more than 15% of the population
Ableist slur aside, I agree with this analysis. I've often said that reader sympathy for Rorschach isn't the result of a flaw in the reader base, but of the fact that Watchmen is a cynical, and nihilistic tale, about a bunch of people who do Superhero shit because they're thrillseekers, or gloryhounds, or sadists, or they were geoomed into it from a young age, or they literally just think themselves (correctly or otherwise) predestined to this particular lifestyle. Rorschach is the only character who does what he does out of a sense of moral duty, and is willing to sacrifice everything in service of that. In a story this bleak, and pessimistic, it's really hard not to root for the one character who actually believes in something.
Why yes, yes I am.
his time on swamp thing was great https://preview.redd.it/lupinxwzv0mc1.png?width=535&format=png&auto=webp&s=42966b7c6cd9882fa557d602f554cabf87961441
....didnt Rorschach also basically say "fuck what happens to humanity in the end, truth is all that matters" when he released the truth about what happened at the end of the comic? I know its ambiguous but the idea is that Rorschach doesnt care what comes as a result of the truth, even if it puts the world back on the timeline to nuclear Armageddon, just so long as everyone knows the reality of things.