Watchmen

[theowlseye]

scoutinthenight has talked of watchmen enough that I decided I needed to go out and read the graphic novel myself. I bought the Watchmen Wednesday and just finished reading it Saturday. The first thing that struck me was how well Alan captured the mood of the 1985 and the fear of nuclear annihilation. He captured the atmophere so well I had to read when the

Comments

[scoutinthenight]

Alan Moore's stories are almost never about people "getting what they deserve"; whether that's the good guys getting a happy ending or the bad guys getting caught and punished. I should loan you "The Killing Joke" at some point, it's probably the best Batman story I've encountered.

Veidt knows he's become a monster, that's why he was looking for some sort of validation from Doc Manhattan at the end. Veidt's journey to that point is essentially the same story as the guy in the Black Freighter comic, good intentions with horrific repercussions.

[theowlseye]

I'm so use to the formula of people "getting what they deserve". Reading Alan Moore is like eating food that isn't sweet for the first time.

[blur01]

Veidt sat down one day and thought long and hard
about what would fix the situation. Then when he had
a solution he stood up....sat back down and began to think about what he would have to do to make sure that his plan went through.

He stood up again and put his plan into motion. Good, or bad, he felt that the ends justified the means (which puts you fairly squarely in the NG realm for alignment).

Create a large enough threat and people WILL band together to save themselves, of not others. Us vs Them is a very very strong instinct.

What strikes me as the most frightening part of the entire book for me was that I put the book down and
thought about it for a bit and was concerned that it might well take something like that to turn the world around. Right now the economic down turn seems to be doing a fairly decent job of realigning the thinking of the world.

[theowlseye]

There is no "Them" in an economic downturn. You can't really wage war on the economy. Although people seem to have a history of waging war on things you can't really wage war on.

[scoutinthenight]

On the contrary. If things get bad enough then the ridiculously wealthy become an easy "Them". That was essentially the French Revolution.

I doubt we'll start guillotining the rich, but I'm guessing/hoping tax breaks for the wealthy will soon be a thing of the past.

Huh, Livejournal's spellchecker has guillotining as an actual word.

[theowlseye]

True enough.

Blind scapegoating goes hand and hand with an economic downturn.