I would tend to agree. It's easy to go back and see his cynicism in the first book after reading Dune Messiah, but reading DM the first time was a hell of a shock for me in high school. Paul's like Hitler? He hates democracy? Fremen hate him? WTF???
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Once you see that Paul is not a good guy, the story of the first book becomes not the white savior but rather the white guy who hijacks a popular revolution and destroys its democratic impetus: Paul is a kind of Lawrence of Arabia figure but in a critical way.
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yeah...not so much in the first book. and I think it's dicey even in later ones. I mean, you think Rorschach is too indebted to pulp to escape the tropes, right? The criticism there is a lot more blatant than with Dune, imo.
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I think it's fair to say that both Herbert & Moore are trying to critique the superman idea but both fall into the trap of offering genre audiences their beloved tropes.
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The same people who like Rorschach like V, even if they’re labelled “Villain” right up front…
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Yeah...see, blaming readers who notice that the characters are enthusiastically glamorized by the narrative seems wrong to me. V's a good example of how an all powerful character can't actually be effectively morally condemned in the narrative.
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Replying to @nberlat @GiffordJames and
V anticipates the moves of everyone in the comic at all times, even arranging his own death and his own successor. No one effectively argues against him; even the woman he effectively rapes doesn't speak against him.
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Replying to @nberlat @GiffordJames and
Moore doesn't make V a villain, though some fans of his obviously wish that he had.
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Replying to @nberlat @GiffordJames and
(I think Rorschach's a good bit more complicated; he loses arguments and fights all the time, ends up betraying his own worst impulses, and dies futilely unmarked and alone. Much easier to argue there's an effective critique of him in the book
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That he loses for a lost cause makes Rorschach more heroic, not less and in any case there's reason to believe that his legacy will live on in his diary. He's the true hero of Watchmen.
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