Quote Originally Posted by gbaji View Post
I didn't get that aspect of things at all from the comic. Rorschach may have started out with some ideological aspects to him, but by the end he was highly disillusioned with just about all of it. He was certainly not some flag waving patriot, nor was he motivated by such things. He had become a kind of bitter psychopath, obsessed with the corruption of moral society, and fought against basically street level thugs and scum as a result (kinda of a really really pathetic and dark/disturbed Batman). The idea of him at all being political/patriotic/ideolistic was an unfortunate invention/recreation of the character used in the Watchmen series to make his followers into something else entirely.
I fully agree. I hated that the "No Compromise, even in the face of armageddon" became "do whatever, so long as you wave a flag" or whatever. It was incredibly sloppy. If you wanted a movement worshipping a dead face of misguided patriotism, the Comedian would have made a far more logical symbol.

The TV show was utterly awful, and I have no idea why it was made, or why it gets any positive ratings whatsoever.

Quote Originally Posted by Saph View Post
The funny thing is that Alan Moore got incredibly pissed off at Rorschach's popularity in the post-Watchmen years. He envisaged Rorschach as a sort of real-life Batman, concluded (correctly) that such a person would be a psychopathic nutcase, and expected everyone to just dismiss him. When they didn't, he decided that his readers had missed the point.
Rorschach absolutely is a nutcase. We, the readers do not want to live his life, the man is literally homeless, and suffers constantly. Yet, suffering for what you believe is heroic, especially when do so out of a desire to provide justice to others. Everyone in this world is deeply flawed, so the one who never stops fighting and is at least nominally on the side of good is certainly the most heroic. He is obviously a flawed man, yet also someone who literally gave up everything trying to fight for what was right when nobody else did.

This gets into a big conflict between western and eastern storytelling. In western storytelling, the protagonist frequently suffers or fails, then learns to change himself, and consequently prevails. In eastern stories, a protagonist more frequently realizes that his path is doomed, and chooses to fight and die anyways. This defeat or death is portrayed as a heroic adherence to ideals over even ones life. Rorschach's path follows this very closely. Both stories are valid, but there is no character that follows the western path and can reasonably be called heroic in this story.