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I never took the Kobayashi Maru test . . . until now. What do you think of my solution?

The fact that he finds the fact of it happening amazing doesn't mean that he saw it as having been possible to have been any other way.

You really think the main story was one of salvation? None of the characters seem to think it'll fail (even Rorschach doesn't debate it's efficacy, only it's morality) but none of the actions that actually come after suggest that they're right. The military industrial complex is still roaring along, only with a new enemy in place of the old. None of the people involved have changed, and not only can we see that clearly, we can see the implications of it right there in the comic.

Would it really have made sense for them to have suddenly done something at the end, after basically taking the path of least resistance for the entire comic? Dreiburg hung up the cowl as soon as not doing so would have required a serious sacrifice rather than keep helping people and retreated into his own little world, adding little to society. Laurie took the path of least resistance all along; Jon's lover rather than fighting her own battles, hating the Comedian rather than attempting to see the complexity of the situation, &c. Frankly, having them suddenly grow a pair would have been a huge copout. By all means, find them loathsome, but don't point that out as a weakness of the story when it was clearly Moore's intent that you did.

So, would you have had Dr. Manhattan engage him in a huge conversation in Antarctica before killing him, thereby ruining the dramatic flow of the end of the story? This is Alan Moore, not Ayn Rand, and there was just no place to put it in and have it fit.

And I'll point to what I said above and say that I don't think Moore would disagree with you. His characters would, but the events portrayed prove them wrong almost immediately. Remember, this is the man who wrote "V for Vendetta."

Yeah, Moore doesn't really "do" happy endings. That's not everyone's cup of tea, but it doesn't make the story itself bad.

As for Jon, that's exactly why he's such a tragic character. He honestly couldn't care less about anything that he does, but his power, and the fact that it allows him to see how deterministic the universe is, makes him incapable of doing anything other than the action he undertakes in the story. He's got enough power to remake the world in his own image, and yet all the power does is make him ultimately incapable of anything other than watching.

Sufficed it to say, I don't think I dislike it for the original reasons I had. I was looking at the book from one perspective, thinking the characters were meant to make judgements based on sound reasoning when they weren't and I think Shem helped show me how to look at it from another perspective, where Moore is purposely making the characters worse in order to play a big joke on the reader.

Now I hate it even more from this new perspective.

Wow, a lot to say here (incidentally, it's good we had this thread. I probably would have enjoyed the book even more if y'all hadn't ruined the ending for me years ago. :) ).

Easiest point first: I read both The Dark Knight Returns and The Watchmen for the first time this summer, and in line with what Shem just said, possibly the biggest impact they had on me was the realization of how big a deal the idea of global thermonuclear war was in the '60-'80s. I was born in '86; by the time I was old enough to understand the idea it wasn't seen as a big threat any more. In fact, my entire childhood was in one of the safest-feeling eras in the history of the world. Those books helped me gain a much deeper appreciation for the raw terror that underlay the world when people were really worried about a global nuclear war between the USA and the USSR.

That aside, perhaps my reading was insufficiently sophisticated or uninformed, but what I got out of the book is different from what Shem got out of it (though less different after thinking about Shem's comments). I agree about Dr. Manhattan: his tragedy is that he had almost unlimited power but couldn't use it to change what he saw coming. I believe that the future is determined; it feels like it isn't, we feel like we make choices, because none of us have any ability to see what's actually going to happen. In that sense Dr. Manhattan isn't any more determined than the rest of us--he makes choices in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons that we do--but he knows what's going to happen, and so those choices seem rather empty to him. He knows he's going to change his mind; that doesn't mean he's changed his mind yet.

A general point on the rest: I see The Watchmen, in part, as an extended meditation on the fundamental unworkability and underlying insanity that would lead to superhero-ing. Jon is his own case, with heroism thrust upon him rather than actively sought out; but all the other characters have at least one deep, major psychological imbalance. Usually sexual. That's sort of the point: if the short form of the book's thesis is "Qui Custodiet Ipsos Custodies," the long form is "Do you want to trust your fate to anyone insane enough to get off on running around in tights and beating people up?"

Rorshach I found understandable but not likeable. He's the embodiment of vigilante justice; and though vigilanteism has a privileged place in the American psyche, it's actually a really bad idea. We all get up in arms when a policeman takes the enforcement of the law into his own hands; it's far, far worse when someone completely uncontrolled does it. So in that sense the dude needed to be stopped. Also doesn't help that he has deep hangups about sex, feels that all sexual activity is filthy, and basically seems to be of the opinion that half of New York deserves to be razed like Sodom. (I'd find quotes but I don't actually own a copy of the book). He's clearly out of control.

Dan and Laurie are both, fundamentally, thrill-seekers. They like running around in costume, showing off; they get off on the whole idea. They aren't noble men and women sacrificing their own welfare for the welfare of society; they're just looking for some thrills. Some partially sexual thrills. (This is a theme with a lot of the characters; Hooded Justice is into sadism, the silk whosits was "sexually depraved," Laurie's mother presumably also got off on it, there was that villain who liked to get beaten up...). Dan and Laurie are just an attempt to deconstruct and eliminate the heroism of the superhero.

The Comedian is in some ways the most stable of them all; he knows exactly who he is. He's an amoral government agent. He's seen that the world is a horrible place, and decided he has to be equally horrible to keep it under control. He's the bleakness of a Hiroshima, of a My Lai: "we have to sink to these depths, we can't afford to lose."

And then there's Ozymandias, Adrian Veidt, who was my personal favorite as a character. He's arguably (possible exception of the Comedian) the only one whose motivations are 'heroic': he starts out with everything, but chooses to devote his life to improving the world. Goes into superheroism, but realizes that that's not actually a useful way of making the world a better place (which is, presumably, why that's not the motive of any of the others). Decides instead to position himself, to play the long game. And the first thing he does, in his quest to make the world great, is become a businessman and capitalist--can't we all appreciate that much, at least?

But then it goes off the rails. He decides that the biggest threat to the world is global thermonuclear war. He decides to engage in an incredibly complicated plan to stave it off, a plan that involves murdering millions of innocents. And he does it. At this point, a lot of what we think depends on whether we think Adrian Veidt is actually as smart as he thinks he is. The libertarian critique, the conservative, Burkean critique, of central planning, is that no one actually knows enough to make that sort of decision. If the computer actually could allocate resources more efficiently than the market could, there'd be a really good argument for socialism. But the fact is that it can't. And the fact is that no one can guarantee that killing this person now will save more lives later. (That's why the fat man + trolley examples always leave me cold; hypotheticals with perfect information are ipso facto detached from reality).

So if Veidt is a realistic person, a realistic entity, then what he did is unspeakable. He chose to gamble, paying ten million lives in the hope that it would lead to a better world. You'd better be pretty damn certain if you're paying that kind of price with someone else's money; more certain than anyone can be in the real world.

But if Veidt is actually as smart as he thinks he is--if his foresight is as impressive as Jon's--well, I'm not sure I'd say he's wrong. If P(the world is destroyed|Veidt doesn't destroy Manhattan)=1 and P(the world is destroyed|Veidt does destroy Manhattan)=0, then the man has a pretty good case for what he did.

Of course, as Shem said, the last chapter suggests that Veidt isn't actually that smart. He saw the first-order effects, and the second, and the third; but he couldn't track all the details, and in the end it looks like one of them will lead to his failure. Which leads to the last critique of the superhero: you're deciding the fate of millions, of billions, and you're doing it unilaterally. No one is good enough, smart enough, fair enough to make that kind of decisions unilaterally. No one should be that arrogant.

Qui Custodiet Ipsos Custodies

the look on the paranoid rag kid's face when he finds and takes the diary is an interesting case of imaginary foreshadowing. who knows what strange fruit that will bear?

lit, if you want to be really, really, really annoyed in this manner by a work of art, i highly recommend john fowles' "the magus."

similar themes to watchmen, but far more of a headfuck.

sometimes pain is good, man.

though i share your distaste in one avenue; it's why i don't watch indie films. the whole wes anderson twee fuckhole routine basically ruined america. (and i think this stuff is beyond that shit, really)

The attitudes changed slightly, but only just), and the last image was of an agitprop poster that was very similar to the ones that had been used previously to keep the population in a state of fear of the Soviet threat, despite the fact that the US had Dr. Manhattan, who was capable of immediately winning a nuclear war all by himself. And the people who had been afraid of the Soviets just became afraid of the aliens instead, which is in actuality, just more of the same. Really, nothing changed at all.

I presume Veidt's plans didn't end at causing the scare; he probably had something that amounted to a subtle, background takeover of the world in the works.

Or maybe he just had epic hubris. This was a guy who went around calling himself Ozymandias. :)

EDIT: I've also come across the silly fan theory that Russia eventually gets wise to the deception and strikes first, leading to only England surviving...and leading into the events of V for Vendetta. (The chronology doesn't actually work, though.)