What Alignment is Rorschach?

[WizarDru]

I'm assuming here that the core question is actually "What Alignment is Rorschach by the end of the Watchmen, or at least post-1976?"

Because there are two Rorschachs in the story...the one who Walter Kovacs pretended to be and the one who replaced Walter Kovacs. They are two different people and have different alignments.

Nite Owl II teams up with the former. He prefers to work alone, but found some value in teaming with Dan and was at least willing to hear Captain Metropolis out about a new team. He fights in the mean streets of NYC, working in the shadows. That Rorschach is gruff, violent and impersonal but finds value in fighting criminals and is trying to save the city. He beats muggers to a pulp, but leaves them tied up for the cops.

That Rorschach never comes out of the burning building, either. In his place is another Rorschach, the one who considers the mask his true face. He kills criminals, has little respect for anyone and believes that the previous Rohrschach was 'soft'...as are any of his previous allies. He sees himself as one of the lone voices in the dark, one of the few that actually cares stopping evil. His respect for the Comedian comes from the fact that he sees a kindred spirit...someone who has lost respect for mankind and knows...knows...that it is filled with irredeemable monsters and weaklings.

The first Rorschach is trying to save the world and believes in justice; the second Rorschach is only concerned with punishing the wicked. The second Rorschach sees nothing but Kitty Genovese's everywhere.

Rorshach is, IMHO, way too complicated a question for the alignment system to answer.

 

[Celebrim]

Rorshach is, IMHO, way too complicated a question for the alignment system to answer.

Walter Kovaks = Chaotic Good
Rorschach = Chaotic Neutral

The thing is that as complex as the story might be, if I said, "Walter Kovaks was a Chaotic Good hero and he suffered a tragedy and his alignment shifted to Chaotic Neutral.", even given the often confusing and contridictory signals D&D has given with respect to alignment, most players of D&D would 'get' the basic ethos of the character from that description alone and know basically how to play him. Some finer points of his personality might be lost, but alignment was never for conveying detailed personality traits anyway.

"OK, he's one of those vigillante good guys, but then tragedy struck and he got 'darker'/'grayer'."

"I can do that."

 

[Irda Ranger]

Because there are two Rorschachs in the story...the one who Walter Kovacs pretended to be and the one who replaced Walter Kovacs. They are two different people and have different alignments.

That's a really good point. I was trying to peg "Rorschach", rather than Walter Kovacs.

I'm not sure they have different alignments though. One thing the D&D alignment system doesn't capture is the level of "intensity" with which one practices their alignment. Most understand there's a difference between a Paladin and a "merely" LG character of another class. Similarly, both demons and cultists can be "Chaotic Evil", but you know the demon is more chaotic evil than the cultist (usually).

Further, Rorschach (the guy who escaped the fire) may have changed his perception of the how the world works and what "best practices" should be used to accomplish goals, rather than a change in the goals themselves. You could posit that both Walter Kovacs and Rorschach were Lawful Neutral (or whatever) but that Rorschach was some Paragon Path "living embodiment of harshest justice."

Or, to riff Scott Rouse and George Orwell, some people are more Chaotic Awesome than others.

Rorshach is, IMHO, way too complicated a question for the alignment system to answer.

Every literary (and living) character of sufficient complexity is. It's a limitation of the system.

 

[doctorhook]

Rorschach is Unaligned. It's characters like him for whom Unaligned was made.

That's all there is to it.

 

[ppaladin123]

Just a quick point. The lawful/chaotic dimension conflates several related dichotomies:

Order vs. Chaos
Communitarianism vs. Individualism
Authoritarianism vs. "Libertarianism"
External vs. Internal decision making processes

These are all related but distinct. I've seen various posters make their evaluation of Rorschach with reference to one of these dichotomies.

For example. I argued that Rorschach would be quite happy/law-abiding under a particularly draconian legal regime. My reasoning was that he favored a strict, all-encompassing legal code that regulated all aspects of others' lives, and severely punished deviance. That makes him rather "authoritarian," and particularly sympathetic to the use of government/law to shape behavior. In that sense he is "lawful."

Celebrim has clearly determined that what really matters for him is the "External vs. Internal decision making processes," dichotomy. Since Rorschach stubbornly maintains adherence to his code despite opposition by currently existing authorities, he is "chaotic." Under this interpretation, deference to some other is what constitutes a "lawful" act.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Is anyone else vastly amused that, when trying to categorize a character called "Rorschach," people seem to be reading into it and getting out of it based entirely on their own personal beliefs?

No?

Just me, then.

 

[ppaladin123]

Is anyone else vastly amused that, when trying to categorize a character called "Rorschach," people seem to be reading into it and getting out of it based entirely on their own personal beliefs?

No?

Just me, then.

I'm pretty sure that's what Alan Moore intended. You win the thread.

 

[Wormwood]

Is anyone else vastly amused that, when trying to categorize a character called "Rorschach," people seem to be reading into it and getting out of it based entirely on their own personal beliefs?

Okay, I actually laughed out loud (although scotch may be involved somehow).

 

[Celebrim]

Celebrim has clearly determined that what really matters for him is the "External vs. Internal decision making processes," dichotomy. Since Rorschach stubbornly maintains adherence to his code despite opposition by currently existing authorities, he is "chaotic." Under this interpretation, deference to some other is what constitutes a "lawful" act.

Yes, that's pretty much it.

I adopted that interpretation from among the competing after getting frustrated with the other ones because it seems to me to be the one most easy to relate back to the other ideas that we gather together in 'chaotic'. For example, 'individualism' derives directly from the fact that internal decision making process is primary, 'libertarianism' derives simply from extending the rights you grant yourself to everyone else, 'insanity' derives directly from the fact that people who are insane are marked by an internal and uncommunicatiable decision making process not shared by anyone else, and so forth.

But I freely admit there are other ways to define the problem. For example, I played in one group where the law/chaos spectrum was defined by the question, "Do the ends justify the means?" Under this definition, 'Lawful' people answer the question, "No.", and chaotic people answer the question, "Yes." That's a perfectly internally consistant definition and it gives a suitable conflict, albiet not necessarily the immediate one we think of when we talk about 'law vs. chaos'.

Adopting this definition with respect to Watchman gives us a completely different (and arguably equally interesting) answer. Under this definition, Rorschach clearly represents an uncomprimising agent of law, and in fact is probably lawful evil (he wants to punish humanity for its trangresses, not save it). The person at the heart of the conspiracy clearly does believe that the ends justify the means, and clearly has a very good purpose (saving humanity), in which case the story may be about the conflict between lawful evil and chaotic good.

I don't particularly like that axis, despite its internal consistancy, because I don't think its truly independent of the good/evil axis, since the question of 'Do the ends justify the means?' has I think a moral component. With such a definition lawful good might really mean 'more good' than 'pure good', which explains Paladins and might make it a very suitable interpretation for 4e. However, even if I don't favor the definition, provided I have an internally consistant definition, I can adapt my thinking accordingly. The important thing is for the DM to decide on a suitable and clear definition.

 

[Celebrim]

Is anyone else vastly amused that, when trying to categorize a character called "Rorschach," people seem to be reading into it and getting out of it based entirely on their own personal beliefs?

No?

Just me, then.

No, you aren't alone; I'm always vastly amused by that. The thing is, I don't know if you've also noticed this or not, but people do that with everyone and not just character's named Rorschach. We could throw out some real world names and ask for alignments and get an equally diverse number of answers.

But this to me proves more about the 'alignments' of the people giving the answers, than it does about the alignment system or the alignment of the people being analyzed.