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  • Jax@sh.itjust.workstoComic Strips@lemmy.worldRorschach Test
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    7 days ago

    TL;DR; trying to suggest Rorschach is not a bad guy but a complex character when he hand waves rape, victims blames rape victims and the victims of hate crimes (contextually a lesbian woman), refers to women as whores, is a fascist and really only manages to do a single heroic thing in his entire worthless existence is ridiculous. Next you’ll try to tell me Trump is a hebephile.


    Great, great.

    So let’s list off some things that I’ve dredged up about Rorschach, not from memory mind you — I simply started looking up what good things and what bad things Rorschach has done.

    Let’s start with the bad:

    As an 11 year old he writes about idolizing Harry Truman for dropping the nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    He’s an avid reader of ‘The New Frontiersman’ which is revealed to be a far-right conspiracy theory and racism peddler. These are the people he leaves his journal with.

    He refers to the first Silk Spectres rape as a ‘moral lapse’ by the Comedian, and I’m pretty sure it’s implied he blames her for her assault. Not only that, he likely said this because he idolizes the Comedian.

    He refers to the victim of a hate crime as a ‘victim of her indecent lifestyle’ — the dude is fucking homophobic.

    Killed a bunch of dogs for being fed the remains of a little girl. Fucked up, very fucked up circumstance but the fact remains — revenge on the man is one thing, revenge on the dogs is another. I don’t think they killed the little girl.

    He’s a misogynist. He frequently refers to certain women as whores.

    Let’s move to the good:

    He punishes his idea of ‘evil’ which leads to him taking out rapists, murderers and other criminals. He likely didn’t know about the Comedians crimes, yet he definitely just doesn’t give a shit considering what I’ve already established.

    He decides not to confiscate Moloch’s medication.

    He decides to heroically kill himself. The single heroic thing he achieves in the story.

    I cannot find more examples of him being good, and it’s hard to say ‘being heroic’ is good in this context.

    So, are good guys homophobic? Are good guys misogynistic? Do they victim blame victims of rape or hate crimes? Would a good guy violently kill a bunch of dogs for being victims of their owner’s crime? Can you be a good guy and be on the far right? Do good guys handwave rape for their idols?

    I’m not arguing whether he’s a good or bad character in regards to the role he plays in the full story. If the conversation were about that then you may have some footing. The question is ‘Was Rorschach a good guy or a bad guy’. He was absolutely a bad guy, despite being the protagonist and the closest thing to a ‘hero’ the story has.





  • Jax@sh.itjust.workstoComic Strips@lemmy.worldRorschach Test
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    7 days ago

    My position has always been that Moore wrote him as a bad example.

    I think a better way to criticize media is instead of thinking characters as good or evil, ask, “are they effective?”, and in this sense, I consider Rorschach to be an effective character. They aren’t there to be good or evil, they’re there to be a reflective surface for the world they find themselves in, and in this way they are an effective character.

    In order to be critical of art you actually need to be aware of the motivations behind why something was created. Like we’ve established, you are free to apply your own meaning to it. However, and yes I am using a reductionist argument to illustrate my point, saying that you should call the Big Bad Wolf the Big Effective Wolf is… silly. It would be like saying we shouldn’t call Sauron bad, he’s simply ‘effective’.

    In a story where characters are actually gray, I would agree with your assessment that we shouldn’t use terms like good or bad. This is literally a story trying to challenge our preconceived notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ — you simply cannot escape the terms when they are so essential to the point of the story. The point being that all of them are bad, especially the ones who don’t think they are (Rorschach).




  • Jax@sh.itjust.workstoComic Strips@lemmy.worldRorschach Test
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    8 days ago

    My man, I need you to recognize — your remix of the comic in and of itself is reductionist. You choose non sequential comments to portray some kind of meta commentary on something you don’t even fully understand.

    Let me be clear. You are allowed to attribute whatever meaning you want to whatever story or art medium you want. That is, ultimately, the goal of any artist — to evoke something in you.

    When the artist themselves attributes a word like ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to the description of their character, to the very essence behind their creation — you are not allowed to simply say that they are wrong.

    You are free to create your own art where the rules are different from theirs. Where there is no truly good or bad individual, just varying shades of gray. However you look like a DBZ power scaler when you attribute complexity to a character where there is none. I’m serious, no one looks dumber than the people spending way more time than they should arguing about things that the creator is likely to just fucking forget (rip Toriyama, ILY).

    Rorschach is meant to be a bad example. You are not meant to want to be like him. Alan Moore thinks you’re a sweaty nerd and that you should stay away from him if you admire Rorschach (I’m paraphrasing but that is more or less his statement on the matter). Media literacy should lead you to answer the question of ‘Is Rorschach good or bad?’ with neither (thus explaining a more nuanced perspective that is just headcanon) or no.




  • Jax@sh.itjust.workstoComic Strips@lemmy.worldRorschach Test
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    8 days ago

    Well, the simple question of ‘Is character x or y?’ is very different from ‘The character is either x or y, choose.’. You can easily answer ‘neither’ to the question of ‘Is character good or bad?’.

    That being said, Alan Moore himself stated Rorschach is meant to be a bad example. So if you want to make the argument that Alan Moore is media illiterate, I’m all ears — I don’t really know much about the guy because Watchmen really wasn’t that impressive to me. (I recognize that if I had read it when it was new and hadn’t inspired so many other stories that this opinion might be different.)