Watchmen 10 Worst Things Rorschach Did Ranked

Watchmen: 10 Worst Things Rorschach Did, Ranked

Rorschach is one of the most popular characters in Watchmen, but for many fans of the book, it’s entirely for the wrong reasons.

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Rorschach is one of the most popular characters in Watchmen, but for many fans of the book, it’s entirely for the wrong reasons. Many fans cling more to how Rorschach presents himself, as a morally uncompromising agent of justice, than the psychopath he really is.

Watchmen writer Alan Moore even weighed in on this, saying he “made [Rorschach] to be a bad example” and would like to tell fans who emphasize with the character “could you just like, keep away from me, never come anywhere near me again as long as I live?” Take a look at Rorschach’s ten most repulsive acts and traits.

10 Childhood Essay

Considering Walter Kovac’s horrifically abusive early childhood at the hands of his single mother, it’s not surprising he ended up the way he did. A childhood essay Kovacs wrote about his parents, published in the back half of Watchmen’s Chapter 6, show how early the damage set in. An eleven-year-old Kovacs defends the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WW2 because President Harry Truman “saved millions of lives,” neglecting to mention how many other people died because of the bomb drop. Kovacs also clings to an imaginary image of his father, who left Walter’s mother 2 months before he was born. His mother claimed it was because of arguments over President Truman, but considering Walter was born in 1944, years before Truman’s term, it’s clear that explanation was a fiction.

9 Treatment Of Dan

Dan Dreiberg/Nite-Owl II is ostensibly Rorschach’s best friend, but as with most social cues, how to treat his friends is something which eludes Rorschach. The first time the two share a scene together, Rorschach has broken into Dan’s apartment and is eating his food (beans, specifically). After the meeting, Rorschach describes Dan in his journal as a “flabby failure.” Dan eventually calls out Rorschach for his behavior, to which the masked man can only awkwardly apologize.

8 Avid Reader of the New Frontiersman

Rorschach is shown reading The New Frontiersman, ultimately leaving his journal and the secrets which it contains in the paper’s hands. Back-up material in Watchmen’s Chapter 8 reveals the paper is a far-right rag, trafficking in conspiracy theories and racist caricatures; one of their published articles even defends the Ku Klux Klan.

That Rorschach avidly reads the paper, and considers it the most trustworthy news outlet in NYC, indicates that he is either indifferent to the paper’s malignant views or outright supportive of them. Either way, his readership doesn’t reflect brightly on him at all.

7 No Sympathy for Sally Jupiter

*Trigger Warning: Reference to sexual assault follows*

One of the most disturbing sequences in Watchmen is a flashback in Chapter 2, where the first Silk Spectre (Sally Jupiter) is raped by by her “Minutemen” teammate Edward Blake. When Jupiter’s daughter/the 2nd (retired) Silk Spectre brings this up to Rorschach in Chapter 1 (chronologically later but sequentially earlier), he dismisses the incident as a mere “moral lapse.” Though he doesn’t go quite so far as to outright say, Rorschach referring to the senior Miss Jupiter as a “whore” later on could even mean he blames her for her own assault.

6 Killing The Dogs

In Chapter 6, Rorschach recounts the event that finally broke him; while tracking an abducted girl, Rorschach discovers the kidnapper’s apartment. There he finds burnt scraps of the girl’s clothing and realizes the kidnapper, Gerald Grice, killed the girl then fed her remains to his dogs. Rorschach’s brutal revenge against Grice may not have been the right thing necessarily, but it wasn’t unwarranted either. What stands as more needlessly sadistic is when Rorschach butchers Grice’s dogs with a meat cleaver, even though the animals couldn’t have had comprehension of, much less complicity in, their master’s actions.

5 Assaulting The Bar Patrons

Rorschach had no compunctions about employing violence, often lethally, against those who he felt deserved it. Unfortunately, his twisted moral calculus meant he dealt out violence to criminals and innocents alike. The latter is first demonstrated in Watchmen Chapter 1 – while investigating the Comedian’s death, Rorschach decides to interrogate the random patrons of a bar. The bartender nervously begs Rorschach not to kill anyone, and the vigilante obliges – he settles for merely breaking people’s fingers.

4 Homophobia

Zack Snyder’s 2009 film adaptation of Watchmen mostly softens Rorschach, but one element that was sharpened was the comic version’s latent homophobia. In one of Rorschach’s journal entries, narrated over the film, he describes the late vigilante “the Silhouette” as a “victim of her indecent lifestyle” – for context, the Silhouette was a lesbian. She and her partner were murdered in a hate crime, as depicted in the film’s opening montage. Comic Rorschach was far from enlightened on sexuality (between his madonna-whore complex and low opinion of Adrian Veidt’s “possible” homosexuality), but even he never said something so reprehensible as the above.

3 Misogyny

Even more rampant in Rorschach’s thoughts is his misogyny. This manifests mostly in either his journal ravings, his general impoliteness to Laurie (even more so than to other characters), and his proclivity for “whore” as an insult. Like most of Rorschach’s mental issues and reactionary beliefs, his misogyny stems from his childhood; his abusive mother was a prostitute, so he conflated his suffering with her gender and profession. As a result, he developed views on women and sexuality most politely described as “puritanical.”

2 Idolized the Comedian

Watchmen demonstrates throughout its narrative what a loathsome man Edward Blake, aka the Comedian, was. Yet, Rorschach idolized the man, both for his costumed vigilante career and his “service” (read: war crimes on behalf of the Nixon administration) in Vietnam.

It’s unlikely Rorschach knew about all of Blake’s crimes (such as shooting a woman carrying his illegitimate child), but considering he disregarded Blake’s attempted rape of Sally Jupiter as a mere “moral lapse,” it seems unlikely that such knowledge would’ve swayed Rorschach’s judgement.

1 Hypocrisy

For all his pretensions of moral absolutism, Rorschach’s reaction to Veidt’s massacre of New York City show he’s ultimately “pick and choose” when it comes to morality. Rorschach is the only one of the characters who refuse to keep Veidt’s actions a secret, a decision which gets him killed by Doctor Manhattan. However, what Rorschach apparently doesn’t realize is that Veidt just executed the exact same thing a young Walter Kovacs had once praised Truman for doing – sacrificing many lives to (supposedly) save countless more. Simple hypocrisy may seem minor compared to Rorschach’s other crimes, but it’s even more damning because it exposes how hollow his one potentially heroic trait – his unwavering moral code – really was.

Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/watchmen-worst-things-rorschach-has-done-ranked/

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