The post got delayed---I wasn't sure whether it would be quarrelsome to continue.
What? I missed you!
As to Hollis Mason seeming like an overgrown 12-year old, the excerpts from his memoirs in my opinion are entirely incompatible with such a view. The authorial voice is that of a mature and decent, although rather conservative, adult.
I primarily meant in sexual matters. He is, as I believe Sally Jupiter describes him, an overgrown boy scout. He's certainly a likeable fellow whom you'd want to have a beer with, but you have to wonder why his settling down didn't involve making a family, as even one of his old foes managed to do. I think that all of the characters represent some sort of extreme personality type, even those who seem perfectly decent on the surface. Mason represents the heroic ideal, but that ideal was created as a preadolescent fantasy, and the lack of romance and/or sexuality in his life reflects that.
As for being a Rorschach fan, again, I can't be. I find it hard to believe such a freak wouldn't be a Jack the Ripper instead of a superhero.
I may have to go back a reread your old posts--my arguments on this subject were all made under the assumption that you were saying that you were a Rorschach fan, but couldn't be if he was as screwed up as I was saying.
Anyway, he basically is a sort of Jack the Ripper, but he preys on criminals. Though the story tells us more than once that he only actually killed on two specific occasions. (One has to wonder how badly injured Captain Carnage was by his fall down that elevator shaft, though....)
The psychiatrist thing did resonate more for me when I first read it as a teen. At that age, I was a lot more susceptable to little epiphanies like the one that the shrink had. As a jaded adult, I can look at Rorschach's story about the kidnapper and just shake my head at the grim reality that such people do exist.
First, as an exploration of power, how Dr. Manhattan's existence somehow leads to US victory in Vietnam requires rather more explanation for a successful exploration of such issues. How this is compatible with the continued threat from the USSR is also relevant. And how the existence of superheroes somehow leads to the endless presidency of Richard Nixon is yet another pressing question to answer as an exploration of power.
Nixon was the first president who was willing to use Doc as more than a deterrent. The USSR was cowed by his existence, but the tensions were bubbling under the surface and exploded forth when Doc left. Similar to what would happen in the real world when the Soviet Union collapsed, and old ethnic tensions burst forth with a vengeance in the former satellite states. Nixon was riding a wave of massive popularity following victory in Vietnam. (Perhaps this is a little overstated, as winning the Vietnam War wouldn't have been nearly as central to our national character as losing it was.) In this environment, people were willing to look the other way when a couple of reporters turned up dead.
One of the things that Watchmen tells us, at the end, is that Social Engineering is such a horrendous evil that a girl-friend murdering rapist like the Comedian would be so horrified that he must be murdered to silence him
When "social engineering" involves one man playing God and murdering millions of people--yes. The Comedian thought that he was the guy who was getting away with murder, but his lifetime of bad behavior had nothing on what Ozy was planning.
Besides, Ozymandias couldn't even figure that Dr. Manhattan would just walk out of the radiation chamber again suggests pretty powerfully that he's all wet.
Ozy was the smartest man in the world, but Doc was just playing on a completely different level than he could deal with. As Doc says, "this world's
smartest man means no more to me than does its smartest
termite." And yet, though Ozy doesn't succeed in his outright attempt to kill the good Doctor, he still comes out on top in that confrontation. I found it to be a very effective play on the expectations that you bring into a super-hero story, how Doc charged to the rescue--then was seemingly killed--then triumphantly escaped death to seemingly wreak vengeance--and then saw the success of Veidt's plan and backed down. I think you're way too quick to paint Ozy as a victim of bias, considering how on top he looks until the very end of the story. Someone who played God with human lives and seemingly got away with it may or may not be due for an eventual come-uppance. That seems dramatically appropriate to me. In a typical super-hero story of the type that this one was breaking away from the formula of, Doc would have come to the rescue and Veidt would have been made to pay for his deeds sooner rather than later. In this one, the "heroes" are confronted by something that's bigger than them, and they're willing to play Ozy's game for the Machiavellian end that he has accomplished. Ozy does win, in the short term...but as Doc and the last panel hint, in the real world, things are never nicely and neatly wrapped up with the words, "The End."
And how is Rorscach "exalted"? Having seemingly failed utterly to stop what he sees as the ultimate evil, he withdraws from a world that he can't live in and takes the reward of a cold and lonely death. If he'd really wanted to make Veidt pay, he could have played along with the others and gotten back to civilization with what he knew. Instead he made an open show of defiance, knowing that he'd be stopped and begging Doc to bring it on. He wanted to die. Doesn't seem like much of a victory to me.
