That'd fair, but I was thinking of the scientific accident angle specifically as being one of the most cliche super-hero origins: Hulk, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and that's just off the top of my head. That kind of explanation is basically just a random miracle with a science-y coat of paint, whereas "supers" of the past tended to have less arbitrary origins, such as divine parentage, esoteric oriental training, or a lifetime of adventuring.
How does it affect internal consistency and versimilitude that a small group of people have untapped psionic potential that they cannot use?
Because it's exactly as you said: this stuff has been theorized about for centuries. As a result, it's been investigated for centuries. In a world where psionics were a credible phenomenon, don't you think the Nazis and their famous medical ethics wouldn't have gone balls-deep into unlocking them? That the Soviets wouldn't have moved heaven and earth and delved into all sorts of fringe science to restore the balance of power once Dr. Manhattan appeared on the scene? Yet in order for psychic powers to function as they do here, it's not enough for Veidt to get it right- it's that everyone else who ever investigated it has to have gotten it wrong. So wrong that the existence of the field was effectively kept secret until Veidt built it, in complete secrecy, from fringe theory to working superweapon in the span of 8 years. By way of analogy, this is the same as advancing astronomy from pre-Ptolemaic to Kepler's theory of orbits over the course of the Reagan administration.
I use this same idea for Jesus being white, Korean, black or whatever. Jesus is like a nicer Galactus.
You're making a mountain out of a molehill. Psionc powers in humans in watchmen ammount to nothing and are basically completely useless, they don't affect the plot and are relegated to a throwaway line, you could remove the line and nothing about the plot would change.
Cool allegory. It makes sense. Although, personally, I believe Jesus himself, individually, looked sort of Arabic or Mediterranean.
I disagree with elements of what other people are saying but I'm mostly with them that the superhero genre is an intrinsic part of the Watchmen. All the backstory about how it got started contributes to the surreal yet semi-believable setting, the themes of personal action vs. state control would work less well, i.e. the whole Keene Act plot element forcing them into retirement. Night Owl can't be just a regular vigilante and the story unchanged. He needs to have some larger-than-himself identity to feel special. He literally doesn't perform sexually with Laurie because he feels denied his power. When she asks him "Do the costumes make it better?" the answer is yes - they matter to him. And I think it also matters to us the audience. Without them you lose a lot. They add to the madness and they add unity to the group. What does the Comedian really have to connect him to the others if he's just a mercenary. You'd ask 'why is he with these people?' Why do Dan and Rorscach hang out together? For Rorschach it was always about justice. For Dan it was about feeling special. If Dan is denied feeling special he would have found something else in life to do. He's independently wealthy - he's seeking purpose more than justice or revenge or anything. I don't think he'd be a vigilante without the chance to play dress up and use cool toys. Ditto Sally who turned being a vigilante into being a B-list celebrity, a kind of didn't-quite-make-it Lauren Bacall with fists. She needs the costume and the identity. And without the superhero identity what does she pass on to Laurie? "Here, wear these sap gloves and go punch a mugger."
This I do disagree with, though. It might be true today but it wasn't true when Watchmen was published. I remember living back then and psychic powers had a lot of common belief in society. We're talking an age when the CIA were conducting genuine experiments in psychic power. Men Who Stare At Goats stuff. Society was filled with serious TV documentaries examining "is it real". Introducing a "psychic shock", especially in a comic, didn't really fuck with the realism that much. But to your point about internal consistency I don't think it fucks with it. Just because nobody had weaponised it before on the scale of Veidt, doesn't mean it would have profoundly altered the setting before that point. And there is a surrealism to the setting that I think allows it. What exactly were Moloch's powers and why does he have bat like ears? Like actual organic pointy ones? Why does Adrian have a giant blue Egyptian cat? It's not dwelt on but I don't think low-grade psychic perception breaks the setting.- there are other weirdities in the setting than Dr. Manhattan.
That's not unique to comics, unless H.G. Well's The Invisible Man is a superhero or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are a comic book, just FWIW. Comics merely are the most popular users of the trope.
Rape?
The squid doesn't happen unless that's real (it's capabilities have to come from somewhere) so it's absolutely integral to the plot. Just because it's not on every page doesn't mean it's not a linchpin. Like TLJ's hyperspace ram, it recontextualizes everything around it. It doesn't work in a grounded setting, not as presented. LE CAPESHIT TRANSCENDANT wouldn't require these conveniences.
"Less arbitrary." Both Griffin and Dr. Jekyll set out to create their discoveries and the rest of the story revolves around the consequences. Like Frankenstein, these stories are about human hubris and the consequences of unchecked scientific power. Comics book origins, by contrast, preserve this kind of storytelling better in villains, who are the ones who actually set out to gain power: the U-Foes recreate the experiment that empowered the Fantastic Four, Thanos seeks the Infinity Stones, Mac Gargen goes through the scorpion hybridization process. Heroes, by contrast, tend not to have agency in their empowerment.
He created her via genetic manipulation, he says as much.
Ooof!
Think I'm going to have to agree to disagree with you on this one. The squid was a project on an unprecedented scale, artists, geneticists, the works. You could have psionics on a low enough level and rarity in the setting that it didn't need to impact the story and still have the giant squid project use it in a way that had never been done before. Vedit is the smartest man on the planet, after all. And I'll reiterate what I said earlier which is that what I remember of that time period it was a very common trope that would seem less outre to readers. A lot of people actually believed in it real world. More so than today.
This is a whole other discussion - and one worth having. Villains intend to change the world. The heroes attempt to preserve the status quo. What do
The point about Moloch is correct, because it's ambiguous. He could just be deformed, or there could be something else going on here. It's thr sort of detail that makes the world of Watchmen so engaging by forcing the reader to ask questions and think about the world. The psychic stuff would have been like that until the giant exploding squid killed millions of people, completely removing all ambiguity and subtlety and having massive, unexplored implications for the setting (what happens when the one world government inevitably dissects this thing and starts reverse engineering it's abilities?)
So it may just be a generational thing; im apparently a good bit younger than you, and "weaponizing latent psychic potential" to me is an explanation on par with "Veidt can catch bullets because he's actually a spirit medium channeling kung-fu masters." It's total nonsense with massive implications that should radically alter the setting but doesn't.
That's my point though: if this stuff was real, then would have worked. Psychic abilities would have been at least somewhat known and quantifiable, which they cannot be if Veidt is to pass this off an an extraterrestrial. Explanation doesn't wash, sorry.
Judges 13-16.
I prefer you saying you're young over saying I'm old, so thank you for that!
It likely is the case and I do think there is a difference in what triggered people's disbelief forty years ago over what does now. It's something I've become increasingly aware of when seeing people watch or read the media of generations other than themselves. The prevalence of belief in psychic powers has changed sharply. Of course I'm seeing it through my own lens of being in a different age group than I was back then (obviously) so I'm trying to allow for that but even so. And it's funny you bring up Kung Fu masters because I remember a guy in my Dojo asking the sensei if he could fly. Which is really the sensei's fault for being the sort of dick who tried to cultivate a mystic air about himself (I found a different school) but even so - you found a tonne of people, and I mean adults, who believed fully in martial arts masters focusing their chi at someone and blasting them off their feet without contact. Stuff like that. Of course such people still exist but psychic powers, spoon bending and so on. You may have read how in Victorian times people loved the occult, spirit mediums, all that stuff. It's never gone away and it takes different forms and it waxes and wanes. I remember people having serious conversations about astral projection as a group. I'm probably building this up more than I ought, it's not like everyone believed this stuff. But I do feel quite strongly that when Watchmen was released the idea of psionics in it was nodded along with more familiarity than it is today because it was one of the tropes of the time.Had a superhero weakness, too!
The movie is a wash for me: for every problem it removes, it adds at least one, in no small part because Snyder can't do subtlety with a gun to his head. All the nuance is Moore and Gibbons', and often doesn't land because of the changes (those models aren't obsolete in this timeline, Zack.) As for the action, the early 2000s were the heyday of the torture porn genre, and boy does it show.But I sense you're not going to budge on this so instead I'll simply say how nice it is to meet another person who, I assume, also thinks the changes the movie made improved the plot.
As much stick as I give Watchmem here, I'm actually quite fond of it- my problem is more of a matter of internal consistency as opposed to the presence or absence of these things per se. I have no problem with the Jedi, or the Force, because even in its most mystical iteration it's properly introduced and paid off, as befits good storytelling. Here, Veidt creates Force theory and praxis essentially out of nothing and uses it to trick the world into thinking he's the second coming, effectively. There's nothing wrong with faeries in thr garden, but they have to be in the garden consistently, not just when it's convenient for the plot. And people shouldn't be surprised at the presence of faeries when they've always been there.
That doesn't count. I do love the fact that people with magic powers were just such a given to people that they didn't need an explanation. Moses and his snake staff trick being easily replicated by someone else like it was very low level magic was pretty odd too.
The squid is just a generic nuke in a fancy coat, he could have filled it with uranium instead of human brains and it would have had the exact same result. Again, you're making a mountain out of a molehill.
No, the coat has to be fancy enough to convince the entire world that it's extraterrestrial. This is literally the villain's plan. If it had just been a nuke it would obviously have started the precise war he claimed he was trying to stop.
The coat is a gigantic multicolor squid teleporting in the middle of the new york. Whether or not said squid kills people with radiation or psychic shock doesn't make much of a difference.
Except teleportation and giant squid are both known things in this universe, so that doesn't work. Jon teleports all the time (yet appears completely ignorant of/noninteractive with psychic abilities, another plot hole.) You're right in a sense, there's lots of good/decent versions Moore could have written, but "giant exploding psychic squid" is the one he actually did write.