Hi everyone, it's your boy Zach. So I'm not sure why this is making the rounds, but it is. And I'm very excited because I am always ready to talk about this.
This is one of my favorite subjects ever. It is Alan Moore hating Rorschach, but there's more to it. So much more.
So it was kind of funny. I was like, I feel like I've done this exact video. I haven't done this exact video.
As far as I can tell, I did some research. I've just given my take on this multiple times, but I went to the what is it called? Original Sources. An interview from 1987 with Alan Moore that shines light on this.
It was kind of funny when I was researching. Like, have I ever done this before? I just like Alan Moore, like what are the all the videos I've ever done on Alan Moore? And I saw like my views from like my heyday. Bro, this channel was never popular.
This is the common thing right now. It's like you changed, that's why you lost all your viewers. First of all, I didn't lose them.
I literally told them to go away when I realized that 80, 90% of them were just here for culture war, but it was never a lot. Even at the so-called height of the channel, it was like five to ten thousand viewers, but it averaged like 7,500 forever, for years. Until I started going to the movies.
I was like, wait a minute, Drinker lies. And then when I said that, like everyone freaked out. So anyway, I have spoken about this before, but I was also relying on memories of old interviews, and then I was like, I could just go reread them.
And so let's just get into it. So this person, gotta zoom in a little bit, they're talking about Rorschach, and they say, the only character that has any kind of sense of justice, principles, and morals dedicates his entire life fighting against injustice and crime, refuses to compromise his ideals, even at the brink of death. The creator of the character wants us to think that this is the most evil and disgusting character of all time that we are supposed to hate.
Is this because I lack media literacy or what? Because I don't get it. Well, you don't get it because what you're saying isn't true. It's like that thing I say about those right-wing news sites.
It's like, a lie you made up is by its nature exclusive, because they'll say like, exclusive! But, you're not getting it because you're not accurately describing it. And we're going to go to the original interviews. Let's just go to them right now.
Why beat around the bush? So, here is, so this is a comics interview from 1987. At the time of the interview, issue 11 had just come out, issue 12 was done, and it was going to come out shortly later, and Alan Moore was basically saying, he was very chipper. If you ever think of him just as this like, this old bitter guy, he wasn't always that way.
He used to be 29, and very successful, and very happy. So, he was around 29, 30 when this interview was conducted. So, the interviewer says, the characters in Watchmen are pretty extreme, some of them.
Obviously, they've been designed that way. In most comic books, there's a lot of care and love put into the characters, and then people kind of latch on to them. I get the feeling that you don't want people latching on to the characters in Watchmen that way.
And, he's like, whoa! How does he talk? Whoa! Whoa! I'm just going to use a regular voice, an American voice. Well, I think, this is Alan Moore, well, I think that all of the characters have a great deal of care put into their creation. But, what I've tried to do is just not make it so obvious, because I don't like this very simple, cheap, and ultimately useless manipulation of the reader's emotions that seems to go on.
Basically, most characters in comics are sort of anodyne ciphers, and I cannot tell you what anodyne means off the top of my head. They're just complete blanks. Um, I'm guessing it means blank.
Um, context clues. I was talking to a friend, and I used the word affectation. And they're like, I don't know what that means.
I'm like, okay, Django. Why do you have the vocabulary of a former slave? You don't know the word affectation? It's like, quit being an asshole. It's like, quit being dumb! Um, we were talking about how gay guys have that voice, and the, um, so-called fact that when they come out of anesthesia, they don't have that voice.
They just talk regular. And my buddy didn't, my buddy's been all around the world, and doesn't know the word affectation. I don't know the word anodyne.
Um, uh, they're just complete blanks with, you know, well, their actual characteristics. They've all got about the emotional depth of My Little Pony. And consequently, people tend to think of those characters as nice, attractive, well-rounded characters.
If they were to have those people around them in real life, they'd probably realize just how far short these comic book characters fall of real personalities. Okay, so. Actually meant to start, like, ... farther down.
Okay, what I tried to do in Watchmen was to take a number of quite radically diverse characters, some of whom would be probably fairly well instantly likable. I find Dan Dreiberg very likable. He's a very human character.
I find Hollis Mason very likable. I find the Silk Spectre likable, both her and her mother. The strange thing is that with characters like Rorschach and the Comedian, who politically and the way they behave are the exact opposite of myself, and I should suspect of most of the readers out there, I was pleased with the way those characters turned out.
Although I didn't spare any sort of effort in portraying the Comedian as a complete amoral monster, I found that while writing the stories, I was starting to develop, not sympathy, that's too strong a word, a curious respect for him as a character. And the same applied for Rorschach. Even though I still found them loathsome, I could come to respect the character in a certain way.
And I think that if I can accomplish that, I can come up with two completely unlikable characters and then make the reader almost have a respect for them despite their unlikeability. Then that is something which is more difficult and much more worthwhile achieving than coming up with characters that are just obviously there as sickly pieces of marshmallow designed, you know, just to lure the readers by their sweetness. So I want to go back to this amazing illustration, which I believe was created for the uh, there was like a tabletop book or a tabletop game.
This interview is a lot about that as well. So I'm getting back to the kind of summaries of what Alan Moore. Okay.
So first of all, a bunch of people just discovered that he's a communist. Like very recently. They're like, I don't like communists.
It's like, it's not the 1950s. I think communist is just like a synonym for leftist, but yeah, he's an actual like communist. And has been since the 70s, I believe.
I'm gonna fight communism by watching netflix little house on the prairie and looking for things that are woke. Didn't find anything in this hour-long video, maybe in the next. But anyway, um Yeah, so the deal, the thing that's so amazing about Rorschach and Alan Moore, his creator, is that Rorschach was, as he said, the opposite of him, or the opposite of how he saw himself.
Rorschach was racist. Rorschach was homophobic. Rorschach was misogynist.
Rorschach was right-wing. So Alan Moore said, I'm not that, I'm the opposite. Why do all British people sound just like different animated animals? Like this would be like an anteater or something.
I'm Alan and eating moo. But anyway, being a good writer, he made these full characters. So Rorschach isn't just racist, just misogynist, just homophobic.
Moore, accidentally, maybe subconsciously, unconsciously, gave Rorschach the max stats on every universally beloved human trait. So he's like, I'm gonna make him a racist. He's also extremely loyal.
I'm gonna make him a misogynist. He's also got a great sense of humor. I'm gonna make him homophobic.
He's also the bravest man who ever lived. Like what the fuck? Let's look at Rorschach's traits. Amazing sense of humor.
Infinite integrity. Infinite or maximum bravery. Loyalty.
So you got humor, loyalty, honor, integrity. These are the things you go back to any Homer, you go to any mythology, any urtext. This is the thing that everybody loves.
Everybody loves a guy with a great sense of humor. Everybody loves a loyal friend. Everybody loves or admires someone with honor and integrity.
So he accidentally created a conservative character that everybody loves. The most liberal people out there love Rorschach. The most liberal people out there love the Punisher.
It's the craziest thing. Oh, so this guy says, The reason Rorschach is one of the most beloved comic book characters of all time is that Alamore put everything he hated into him. He sculpted him in the image of what disgusted him the most, and Alamore is, to put it simply, a vile fucking human.
At its core, what he hates is the very concept of good. Thus his creation in the image of his ire is profoundly good. He has never self-reflected on this fact and never will.
He physically can't comprehend that he's the bad guy in all of his stories. Fuck Alamore. Watchmen is good in spite of him.
It's more complicated than that. Watchmen is good because of him. And everyone else on the team and everyone who approved it and financed it and all that type of thing.
That being said, he's expressed for decades frustration that fans will come up to him and they say, I love Rorschach. I would love to know him. And he's just like, I don't understand.
Rorschach is ugly. He's stinky. He's a racist.
He's also the best friend you will ever have. The most loyal friend. There is a moment in the comic, and I'm not crazy about the movie.
They did a great job in the movie, where, you know, Rorschach's bumping his gums, being very, uh, autist-coded, and Driver just gets sick of him. He's like, you, you eat my food while insulting me. Nobody puts you in your place because everybody thinks you're a goddamn lunatic.
And, in, it's slightly different. In the comic, you just see him from behind and he's extending a hand and he's just like, basically like, I'm sorry. I know it's difficult to be my friend.
Look at me, I'm getting a little choked up. I value your friendship. Words to that effect.
Blanket on. Actually, I have it on my, I, I forgot to get it ready, but, um, let me go to YouTube, turn the volume down, go to my page, go to my community posts, open it up. What does it say? Okay, so, I can't, I can't zoom in it.
He goes, uh, Daniel, you are a good friend. I know that. I'm sorry that it is sometimes difficult.
And he's, uh, he's referring to being his friend. Bro, the most sincere apology, not an automatic apology, not a forced apology, the most sincere apology in the history of fiction on earth. So you got a guy who can apologize when he goes too far.
He's aware of himself. He appreciates the friendship of others. So you give this guy like the max, you know, the, the video games where they got like the sliders and sometimes when you slide one up, it automatically slides one down so you can't just make like a perfect character.
So like he slides, you know, humor to the maximum and then, you know, anti-racism goes to the, to the bottom. So he's, he's a racist. I was actually even thinking about it.
Not only are Rorschach's good traits universally admirable right now, they have been through all of, what, 40,000 years of human history. The things that are his faults only became faults like a couple hundred years ago. Nobody cared if you were racist 200 years ago.
Nobody cared if you were sexist 100 years ago. Nobody cared if you were homophobic 50 years ago. And a lot of them, I have this friend and everyone's always surprised I'm friends with him because they're like, he's so dumb and mean.
I was like, yeah, but he's, he's more dumb than mean. He's mean because he's dumb. He's actually a pretty cool guy.
People can't help being dumb. Rorschach can't help being raised. Do you think he's gonna have charitable views on women raised by the mother he had? Do you think he, he was of his time? Again, this was set in the 60s initially.
He would have grown up in the 40s and 50s. But despite all of his challenges, he's a hell of a guy. Everybody fucking lost it.
And especially, I've talked about this with like Asmongold. Every factory, every restaurant, every platoon I've ever been has a guy like Asmongold. And he says super offensive things, but you see in his heart like he's a good guy.
He's just, you know, he's a peckerwood. It happens. They're out there.
but uh, yeah, so maximum bravery, maximum honor, maximum integrity, maximum loyalty, great sense of humor, best apology in the history of humanity. And they always emphasize, you know, he's dirty, he's stinky. He got that fit on though, you know.
He's looking good. He's a baller on a budget. He's got the trim, you know, you know physique.
He's got the cinched weights on the the trench coat. Although I will say, I will say, it always bothered me. Like I said, I'm not a huge fan of the movie, but Jackie Earl Haley, perfect casting.
Performance perfect. The look, everything. I just disagreed on how fast the blobs would move in the mask because you can pretty much gauge it from the comic.
It, as far as I could tell, it would sometimes coalesce into a shape for a little bit. And then like heat or movement or impact would make it change. And sometimes it would just suddenly change to another shape.
But in the movie, it's kind of like always changing most of the time. Very quickly. I never got that impression.
I think sometimes it was just kind of there and then his, you know, he would get upset and his cheeks would heat up or something like that. Or he would get punched or he would start running, breathing hard, and I thought I think that's what made it change. Also, I think just sometimes he would just blob into a different shape.
But uh, yeah, sorry, sorry, Helen. He created like the best, and he didn't create any shitty like Captain Democracy versus the Legion of Libtards. He's like, I really hate conservatives.
Let me make a character that makes fun of conservatives. But also, I'm a good writer. So I'm going to give him good and bad qualities.
And he just happened to give the character he hates, probably the second most, the maximum stats on the most admired qualities in every culture in all of human history. I had one other thing to say, but I forget what it was. Something about Rorschach? Something about, I don't know.
I think I talked about everything. There was one other thing. I'm gonna think about it right after I stop recording this.
But um, uh, and it's so funny because nobody else was really able to write when they did that, like, before Watchmen. Nobody was really, like, the funniest thing is that only the communist who hates Rorschach can write him properly. Because, oh, I thought of it.
So, when Alan Moore was hired to write Swamp Thing, he was very excited. It's one of his first American assignments. I think it might have been his first American assignment.
And he was talking to them and he goes, Which swamp? And they're like, what? He goes, he's from a swamp. Which one? They're like, I don't know, you decide. He's like, I think I'm gonna make it Okichobe.
He's the type of guy, when you say, this guy's from the swamp, he says, which one? He's going to fill out and flesh out this character. So he wanted to zing conservatives. He instead proved that he's better at creating conservatives than conservative heroes than they are.
Actually, he probably created more conservatives. Think about it. Who would draw someone to conservative more? Rorschach, with all his faults, or some flamboyant, campy, conservative YouTuber? It's not what the fans want to see.
It's literally what the fans don't want to see. It's just hilarious. It's like, who are the conservatives? It's like, Az.
It's like, fat gay Brit? Like, what the fuck? Disperu, a Brit who doesn't wash his teeth or anything else. All these, like, these drunk townies. It's like, My SI has just told me about Soapy Skulls.
The first Tuesday, he's just tearing his balls. What the fuck? Congratulations. Alan Moore, you have recruited more people to conservatism than extremely flamboyant, closeted YouTubers have pushed away.
Faceplant, patriots. I just watched every single season of, um, what's the gayest show out right now? Gossip Girl. I was like, wait, that was like 20 years ago, right? Whatever.
Whatever's the gay show right now. The funny thing is when they, uh, defend him, it's like, it's his job, man. His job is to watch movies and TV shows made for eight-year-old girls.
That's his job. That he chose to have. And this is your defense of him.
Anyway, uh, I love Orshan. Great character. Great character.
Thank you, Alan Moore, communist, for creating him. Thank you for being a good enough writer at the time to give him good and bad traits. And thank you for giving him the maximum on all of the best traits of a human.
Anyway, thanks for watching. Bye.
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