I'm Not Mister Mxypltk said:...I mean Parys. I can't find the thread where you asked about this (it might be because I haven't looked), but here it is:
So yes, there does come this point when characters start talking to you. They'll start telling you what
they want to do, you'll know what they would say and what they wouldn't say. I mean when I started writing Watchmen , I'd got no idea that Rorschach was gonna be dead by the end of it, it was just by about issue three I started to know the character and I thought: “he's got a death wish”…he's so self-destructive, he's clearly…he wants out. There's no way that he's gonna live through this, he wouldn't be able to live with any sort of moral compromises, so he'll have to die. But it was the character himself who told me that, after two or three issues. I'd got no idea when I started it.
More:
http://www.enginecomics.co.uk/interviews/jan05/alanmoore.htm Hurm......(pun intended)
Well, that definitely explains what I wanted to know.
I originally thought that he was trying to say that his death was justified cuz' principles don't mean shit. I mean, I thought Moore was saying that killing Rorsach was the right thing to do in the hypothetical situation.
You know what...I take back my capitulation of how Moore interpreted Rorschach's (alleged) death wish. It sounds more like he just couldn't process the idea that anyone could live the way Rorschach does--choosing suffrage over compromise--without being considered insane, and therefore used an inappropriately Moorian approach to make (what was supposed to be) a Rorschachian decision.
I recall he did an interview in which he explained that he was totally befuddled by Rorschach's popularity. He was
not expecting such a warm reception to a character concept the attraction of whom is his integrity and obsessiveness in pursuing his goals as a matter of an inherent moral drive rather than a greater good. He designed him to be a parody of Ditko's The Question and Mr. A, and so he treated him...like a parody. To his surprise, the sheer honesty of his portrayal resonated.
That being said, Moore hit all the right notes with Rorschach throughout Watchmen, creating a self-styled hero worthy of the pride of hardcore conservatives: a person driven by an inflexible set of principles and, in Moore's own words, absolute "integrity". And there in lies the issue: Moore's inability, as an anarchist-cum-moral relativist, to understand integrity as an ethical bedrock for maintaining oneself--rather than a symptom of an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder--caused him to lose touch with the character entirely. He played this Objectivist character's tune so well that his radically subjectivist mind couldn't comprehend Rorschach's behavior. And so he phoned in his last couple of lines and dubbed him suicidal.
