Day Six: Who is your favorite superhero? Why?

Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon. That's always been the difference between us, Daniel. ~Rorschach. Watchmen.

For those of you who haven’t read Watchmen or seen its fairly accurate movie version, you really should. It has violence like you wouldn't believe, but it is insanely good.

Watchmen gives its audience a view of an alternate reality where superheroes exist, and it is not a very nice place. It’s an alternate history story, where Earth is on the edge of nuclear war. The plot itself is very complicated and would take a long time to explain, so I shall not do that. All you need to know is that its protagonists consist of a group of semi-retired superheroes.

My favorite of these is a man named Rorschach. He is a vigilante who dresses in a pin-striped suit, a trench coat, a fedora, and a white mask with moving inkblots. He also has a voice reminiscent of Batman. His mother was an emotionally abusive prostitute, and he was tormented by his peers all through his childhood. As a superhero, he has no powers. Out of all of the superheroes in this story, there is only one with any special abilities; all the others are just highly proficient in hand-to-hand combat. Rorschach is wanted by the police, and by criminals he has sent to prison. He is considered by the general public to be a mass murderer, but in his mind, he is a crusader.

Rorschach’s intentions are laudable, but his actions are indefensible. All he wants is for there to be justice in the world, but his black-and-white view of everything coupled with his ridiculously high moral code means he oftentimes takes his anger at humanity out on people who do not necessarily deserve it. His way of dispatching wrongdoers is unnecessarily violent – he has enough skill in hand-to-hand combat to defeat his enemies without doing too much damage, yet he still makes use of meat cleavers, cooking oil and toilets to get the job done.

Obviously, he isn’t my favorite superhero because of how good of a person he is. I like Rorschach because he is interesting. He isn’t limited by the bonds of the classic superhero archetype; he is not committed to justice in a way that traps him in the life of a good and pure person. His commitment to justice is so strong that, while to some degree he’s aware that his actions are wrong, he doesn’t care what he has to do to achieve said justice. Rorschach has many obvious, defining flaws, and he wears them on his sleeve. He isn’t written in such a way that the audience is expected to overlook these flaws. His faults are as much a part of him as his good qualities; seeing his actions in the story, the audience is forced to see him as a whole person.

I think I’m the type of person who enjoys anti-heroes more than classic heroes. Anti-heroes tend to be multi-faceted, and bring a slice of reality into an otherwise unrealistic situation. They catch your attention and then make you think about them. They aren’t likable in spite of their flaws; they’re likable because of them.