One of my edgier pop-culture takes is that non-anarchists are too stupid to do anything useful with Watchmen, everything after that 12-issue run has been different flavors of dookie milkshakes

If your politics aren't up to snuff, sit down and shut up

If you think America was a good idea, you're just gonna fuck this material up

Snyder did, Lindeloff did, Doomsday Clock did, next dipshit will—the refusal to even acknowledge where the original story was coming from causes the failure of anyone to add anything meaningful to it

I'd rather not have to reduce a text to raw ideological failures of the readers, but with this one? We must. To wit:

Chuds don't understand that the Comedian is just a rape-thirsty goon getting a government paycheck to do what he already does

Randroids can't clock that Rorschach is a disgusting, repressive piece of shit with a bug up his ass about absolutes with a negative legacy on the genre and medium

I'm of at least three minds on Ditko, at least one of them would repeat what I just said with his name filled in

Capitalists, social climbers, transhumanists and other dumbasses who think you can defeat entropy with status can't imagine the psychic tentacle death visited upon the world by Ozymandias might be wrapped around their throat

White liberals aren't going to notice that for all the pretensions Nite Owl and Silk Specter make towards being better than their peers, they still benefit from and participate in the same state violence with sexual enthusiasm

STEMlords don't see (or care) that Doctor Manhattan is essentially what happens when you give a depressive Redditor with a taste for jailbait the power to split atoms, even the power of a god won't get your heart out of the basement

The conscience of the story is Silhouette, and she died in the opening act by hate crime

She's not a bad person, people just miss the significance of the One Good Cape getting killed by the world's pettiness about sex and gender

There's commentary there past the shock, who knew

This is not a story for feeling good about things, this is a wizard trying to tell people to think about the world with a story that isn't as arcane as people make it out to be

It's a perfectly legible story if you're not trying to ignore parts of it that don't flatter you

Every creative voice after Moore/Gibbons has had this cloying desire to say "...but you didn't mean ME, right?" to the text, not wanting to be The Problem

The reflex a lot of people have where they need to—at once—revere and completely miss the point of several 1980's oneshots (this, The Killing Joke, The Dark Knight Returns, etc) that have swallowed the capebooks in the decades since, that reflex needs to be killed

Deconstruction is not when toys for children cuss, kill, and fuck

Deconstruction is the violent interrogation of stories, demonstration by acceleration

Deconstruction does not even need to be dour, anyone who's seen Lego Batman can tell you that

To conclude, the shallow/incomplete readings of the text persist because Watchmen spends 12 issues breaking kayfabe, and capebook readers don't actually like being criticized that much

Hamartography over, go back to enjoying things

PS: A defense of Rob Liefeld exists, in that he seems affable and he's a useful funhouse mirror for what everyone else is/was doing

The defense for Frank Miller is more or less that 80's comics readers were too busy being fascist sympathizers to notice that he's always sucked