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Pariah said:Not in Watchmen's case. I actually took this into account. I'd agree with you had this been a story about shooting up bad guys and destroying cosmic evils. But no.

The entire foundation of the story was to get moral and enlightening points across about the essence and realities of the heros' lives and then the cause and effect stages of such. There was no real greater bearing of the story. It wasn't about conquering a huge bad guy or saving the universe, it was outlining a sort of morbid enlightenment about the reality and not the face value of heroes.

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You might as well not do it.



Nah. Manhattan would still know, and the fact that his view point is where we'd see this from is all that would count in the end.

And you know it prolly would have been one of the first times that plot device was ever used. It wouldn't be repetitous and such. So excuse the presumptuousness when I say you prolly wouldn't be too sore about it if it came out that way.



A) Undoing has always been lame. Taking the time to undo because of outside factors (preserve the DCU as it was) and not because the story dictates so can be a great source of lameness. Moore would have pulled it off only if he had found a good story to tell with the undoing. And, I don't know if you're aware of this, but good ideas are often born spontaneously and not because of necessity ("I have to find a good idea for this specific thing (undoing) or the story will be flawed"), in fact, it's when an author feels the pressure of having to come up with good stories out of necessity that the level of quality starts decreasing (which is why often runs don't end as good as they started unless the writer stops them at the right time: at the beggining the writer was using a setting to serve a story, and when the setting proves to be popular it's the setting first, the story later, so it becomes harder and harder to come up with good stories). You may find good stories when they're forced on the writer ("cause it's his job"), but you'll never find anything genius. I don't know about you, but it's the genius moments what keep me coming.
B ) When Watchmen starts the world is a different place than it was in the DCU at the time. The changes in society brought by Dr Manhattan don't happen after the starting point of the story, they happen before. How could have Moore introduced the changes if, instead of creating a new world, he had to use an already established one? He could have made it so the changes were less noticeable, but that would have changed the impact they had in the story.
C) So, Watchmen is an epic story that gets undone by the end, but for the current universe to exist it must have happened. So it happened and it didn't. Does that sound familiar? In what epic 12 part series from the mid 80's does that happen too? It was hard to accept and explain when it happened once, do you think the readers of the time would have accepted it happening twice? It's like the twist at the end of The Others: many people, some very intelligent, feel that movie is tainted because they think the twist is taken from The Sixth Sense, and because they can't accept it being pulled on them twice because of it's complexity.

Watchmen is a carefully constructed story where EVERYTHING matters. Messing with any of those pieces may make a good story, but not something genius like Watchmen.