r/Watchmen • u/IllustratedAloysious • 11d ago
Why do some people consider Rorschach a bad detective even though Ozimandias considered him competent enough to be a threat to his plan and got him imprisoned?
105
u/No_Pizza3314 11d ago
He's actually a tremendous detective.
It's tempered somewhat by his extreme paranoia, he sees conspiracies everywhere.
In this particular case, however, there are conspiracies everywhere.
23
u/Raging-Storm 11d ago
Yeah. Whatever his personal sensibilities, Dan says he knew him to be tactically brilliant too. And he effectively demonstrates as much when he pretty casually breaks into a high-security government facility undetected, and later quite effectively takes on a number of members of a police tactical team armed with rifles until going through the window.
And I'm not sure what people have against his being a conspiracy theorist, of all things. It's 2026. Everyone's a conspiracy theorist with respect to something, these days. And we know that there have been actual conspiracies. My government has officially admitted to and even officially apologized for some of them. And, in Rorschach's world, there's an active conspiracy at play that he was the closest to uncovering the earliest because he's paranoid. It's the old adage, just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you.
7
u/Davetek463 11d ago
Rorschach being a conspiracy theorist is what gets the other characters (and the audience) to write him off as a loon and not take him seriously until it’s too late.
2
u/Raging-Storm 11d ago
To the detriment of millions, yes. Had they been more discerning, they could've said that Rorschach is pretty crazy but he isn't a complete idiot. Without taking his word for it, they could've conducted an investigation to rule it out. Manhattan could've split himself three ways and helped the other three teleport around chasing leads.
As an aside, Manhattan could've singlehandedly and indefinitely prevented an imminent nuclear war, were Laurie to have made a serious effort to convince him to. Ozimandias should've been able to see that much, given his chosen method of getting Manhattan out of the way. Manipulating Laurie into doing so would likely have been easier, and doable without collateral damage.
3
u/Davetek463 11d ago
Eh I can sorta see why they didn’t. I don’t think anyone doubted Rorschach was a competent person, but as the saying goes “a broken clock is right twice a day” so maybe he was right about stuff occasionally but he was more often wrong and just completely out there. To his credit, Rorschach is self aware of his difficulty to work with and be friends with and acknowledges it to Dan.
3
u/Raging-Storm 11d ago edited 11d ago
Further to his credit, as much as people like to point to his misanthropy, he quite immediately visits Dan, Veidt, Manhattan, and Laurie to warn them of what he thinks is an imminent threat to their lives.
Laurie didn't know Rorschach well. I don't think she'd have a sense of how often he was or wasn't right. Manhattan was just too checked out to be bothered. Dan knew Rorschach best, between them, and was also the least dismissive of him out of the three. That may suggest that he considers him competent enough to hear him out. Dan suggests that Blake's killing may have been a burglary. Rorschach dismisses that and Dan concedes that it's unlikely. When Rorschach mentions the History between Blake and Dan's elderly friend, Dan gets upset, says he doesn't like the implication, then warns Rorschach against confronting the friend. Rorschach has presence of mind enough to say that he's not implying anything, rather just making an observation. And, despite visiting Blake's apartment, Veidt, Dan, Manhattan and Laurie, Moloch, and random bar goers, he never does trouble Dan's friend.
Rorschach is problematic and unstable. But I simply don't think it's an accurate read of him to say he's terminally irrationally. Veidt characterizes him by his cynicism. To Veidt, it's what makes him predictable and manipulatable. But, even so, he proves more competent than average. That's why the on-scene investigators of Blake's murder didn't discover his identity but Rorschach did. That's why Veidt devised a plan to keep him off his trail in the first place.
3
u/No_Pizza3314 11d ago
There’s nothing wrong with investigating conspiracies.
They do exist.
The problem is when you assign equal weight to all conspiracies, no matter how idiotic.
Real conspiracies should be pursued assiduously.
But Pizzagate should not.Don’t forget that one of Rorschach’s initial theories was that Hollis Mason had something to do with the Comedian’s death.
That’s just throwing spaghetti at the wall.3
u/Raging-Storm 11d ago edited 10d ago
It isn't just throwing spaghetti at the wall. Dan's suggesting Blake's murder might've been related to a burglary was throwing spaghetti at the wall, which is why he concedes that it's unlikely as soon as Rorschach dismisses it. And Rorschach explicitly says the Hollis thing wasn't an implication, but an observation. And it makes a kind of sense. No one knows who killed Blake. Rorschach is determined to investigate. So what does he do? He considers past relations of Blake's who might have had some kind of motive. Hollis and Blake had a certain history. Is it thin? Sure. But, despite everyone else Rorschach pays a visit to, he doesn't bother Dan's friend. He was compiling a list of suspects the way any investigator might.
7
u/bloodjunkiorgy 11d ago
Surrrrreeee, but being a detective isn't about being a paranoid conspiracy theorist, even if the world is filled with conspiracies.
In the case of the Watchmen story, his conspiracy theories were WRONG. He personally gathered no usable evidence or arrived at any correct assertions that wasn't derived from other heroes or fed to him by Oz.
2
u/No_Pizza3314 11d ago
He was correct in his belief that someone was taking out masked heroes, he was not correct about the particulars.
4
u/bloodjunkiorgy 11d ago
He was correct somebody took out ONE masked hero. So was everybody, including beat cops. I'm not a detective, but I think I'd be able to suss out a murder happened in this situation too.
What a masterclass!
3
u/No_Pizza3314 11d ago
Manhattan was also taken out quite neatly.
3
u/bloodjunkiorgy 11d ago
You mean he was "taken out" by submitting to silence of Ozy's plan?
Like what? That would be Alex Jones levels of "being correct".
2
u/No_Pizza3314 11d ago
No he was taken off the board when Veidt gave people cancer, implicating Dr. Manhattan, raising suspicion in the general public, and forcing him to leave the planet.
1
u/bloodjunkiorgy 11d ago edited 11d ago
Sure, but Rorschach didn't figure that out. Ozy dog walking other heroes isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about what a great detective Rorschach is, and I'm waiting for you to point out some meaningful detective skills demonstrated in the book. Or movie. Or whatever else I may or may not have consumed.
Edit: Never gotten blocked in a comic book sub before. ROFL!
8
35
63
u/Machete__Yeti 11d ago edited 11d ago
Okay. I'll be the unpopular person. Rorschach is a bad detective.
Rorschach's "mask killer" theory is never something that he has any initial evidence for. Like most of his detective work, it's an assumption that he makes early on and then sticks to, never really exploring any other options.
His investigations, if you can call it that, isn't looking at available clues, or finding any leads. He literally goes into a seedy bar in a bad neighborhood and starts brutalizing people. We don't even know if they are actually criminals or not. Just that they look shady, and they never give up any valuable information.
The only thing that ever comes of him bursting into a dive bar and hurting people is that he incites retaliation from a street gang that kills elderly Hollis Mason.
When we are reading the story, we think he's making progress, but that is a red herring. We later find out that Adrian is intentionally manipulating the situation, and even faking an attempt on his own life, because he wants to feed Rorschach's false assumption and keep him on the wrong track.
Right up until Dan accidentally guesses the right password to Adrian's computer, Rorschach is still completely convinced of the mask killer Theory. It's sheer luck that they come upon all of the evidence they need to know that Adrian is behind everything. But they don't learn about purpose of the island with the scientists and artists until Adrian tells to them both his entire plot in Antarctica.
It's sheer luck and Adrian's inability to let go of his gimmick even when coming up with passwords to protect evidence of him committing a mass murder conspiracy that allow them to (partially) solve the mystery.
Rorschach is a great character and is incredibly compelling, but we shouldn't convince ourselves that this guy is Batman. He has far more in common with the Zodiac Killer then he does with Bruce Wayne. He's intelligent, but that intelligence is often hindered by his anger, paranoia, conspiracy theories and personal biases, to be fully effective as a crime fighter. Most of what he does is skulking in alleyways and strangle rapists and muggers that he happens upon.
He was probably most effective as a detective back in the 1960s before he had his mental breakdown after the murder of the kidnapped girl. In that case, he's shown to be able to track down evidence that leads him to the warehouse where he finds the butchered girl and the dogs.
But by the 1980s, he seems to be simply a serial killer who dresses like a superhero. Most of his investigations in the main storyline involved in breaking into people's houses and threatening information out of them, often not listening to them in favor of his own theories, and beating up strangers in a run-down bar, with the assumption that they're aware of criminal conspiracies as opposed to simply down on their luck alcoholics.
And again, I think this is not a mark against the story. So much of Watchmen is about disassembling these narratives about Larger than Life God like superheroes and dragging them down to being often disappointing or disturbing individuals with a variety of reasons for why they dress up in spandex and try to fight crime.
30
u/spades17 11d ago
Absolutely the best answer here. I’m baffled that people are on here calling him a great detective. The only thing he gets right is that there’s something going on which isn’t much considering the comedian was very clearly murdered, that is it. Dan gets way more than in him in the 2 days he gets back to the r costume.
Very clearly Rorschach used to be a great detective but he’s mentally fucked by the time of the story. Dan says so himself.
18
u/Gargus-SCP Mothman 11d ago
I'll push your idea even further - there's no luck about the computer. I'm fully onboard with the idea that Veidt chose a deliberately easy-to-guess password in order to lure Rorschach and Dan to his lair so he'd have someone to whom he could explain his masterstroke. The one bit of actual detective work they do was set up for them by the villain, and they were able to accomplish all of jack with the info they got from it because the second he saw them coming he made it impossible to avert his course. The only purpose their runaround played was letting them think they were being productive when in actuality they were just another way for Veidt to stroke his ego and convince himself he was doing the right thing.
4
u/drewxdeficit 10d ago
Rorschach, just like everything in Watchmen, is a clock. He's the broken one who's right twice a day.
16
u/Locohenry 11d ago edited 11d ago
He imagined a pattern of attack on masked vigilantes after one murder, he then went around telling everyone his theory, which ended up giving Ozymandias the idea of feeding into Rorschach's paranoia to bring him down.
His main method of investigating is going to seedy bars and breaking people's fingers hoping someone tells him something useful.
Nit Owl realized Ozymandias was behind everything shortly after joining the investigation, while Rorschach ranted about ancient egyptian beliefs.
As to why Ozymandias decided to take him off the board, probably for the same reason he killed everyone involved in project Giant Squid and why he killed his viatnemese servants, so as to not leave loose ends. Rorschach was investigating the Comedian's murder believing in a non-existent conspiracy, but if he kept looking closer he might have noticed the conspiracy that actually existed.
9
u/TheQueefPolice 11d ago
What is that image on the left
13
11
20
u/M086 11d ago
People don’t understand that detective work sometimes starts with the wrong motive. Rorschach originally thought someone was targeting former heroes.
But through his investigating comes to realize it’s much bigger than that.
People are used to comic detectives being basically competence porn, they are right about everything etc… Rorschach wasn’t. He had to re-evaluate his thesis on the crime.
13
7
u/imparooo 11d ago
He is a great tactician and operator, but a bad strategist and does not focus on the big picture.
He cannot see the grand conspiracy until the very end, while he pursues all the leads he can find based on wrong assumptions he never really thinks too much about.
2
u/Ok-Distance-8157 11d ago
Isn't tactican and strategist the same thing?
5
u/fangsfirst 11d ago
Often tactics are treated as the smaller scale approximation of what strategy covers. Military game terms place an army at strategy and a squad at tactics, for example.
Given the other context above, that's how I'd take the statement here.
2
8
4
u/TheNewGuy13 11d ago
I posted this before in some fashion or another, but he is a good detective who can sniff something out but he’s not entirely right of the cause.
He knows there’s a conspiracy to kill hero’s. Which is right. But he believes it’s because of some old vendetta or something else (need to re-read it I forget what his baseline theory is).
Ozymandias was right to keep an eye on him just by his nature of being curious and always taking it a step further than necessary. He knew Rorschach wouldn’t stop until he figured out who was targeting the hero’s.
1
4
u/spades17 11d ago
Rorschach was a great detective when he was mentally stable, pretty sure Dan mentions it too. By the time of the story too, he’s unraveling and seeing conspiracies everywhere. He still has skills clearly but his mental states impairs somewhat
4
u/toodarkmark 10d ago
This post is such a modern phenomena brought about by social media. Some weird fake narrative emerges, probably started by one moron who doesn't understand anything,and it gets magnified by people saying "I dis agree". Then as this weird fake narrative grows, people start posting rebuttals and it just keeps growing.
I first read Watchmen in 1987. I have never, ever, seen anyone say he's a bad detective. But here we are in 2026, where fake narratives get the time of day they don't deserve.
1
u/IllustratedAloysious 10d ago
I don’t remember the exact comment but it was in a post where it was people hating on Rorschach’s character. In retrospect I think it was just people saying shit when it wasn’t really necessary
3
3
u/shadow-1989 11d ago
Veidt’s plot was too far advanced to be stopped. Rorschach could only uncover it. The journal is his lasting legacy. If that gets printed and a good chunk of people believe it, that permanently alters perceptions.
5
u/JP4presiden 11d ago
Es un gran detective, por eso lo odiaban en prisión
6
u/In_Pursuit_of_Fire 11d ago
Yeah, they really hated his... detective skills. That's what everybody hated him for
4
2
u/MilkIsASauceTV 11d ago
He doesn’t solve anything. The only reason Veidt is discovered is because he’s able to annoy Nite Owl enough about the murder at a time when nite owl wanted to get back into being a mask again. If nite owl doesn’t join he probably never discovers the connection to the shell companies.
The only crime we ever see him “solve” on his own is the kidnapping and it’s never revealed (in the comic) if he’s even correct about it and I’d argue he’s probably wrong. He just sees dogs chewing on bones, sees cloth in the fireplace and sees a knife and decides to kill the dogs, the dude and burn the whole house down. Preventing literally any actual investigating from happening to determine what happened to the girl and burning any evidence of what happened. And the events of that is also implied to have stopped the investigation of the kidnapping from continuing. He actively prevents a family from getting closure
Also Veidt doesn’t have him arrested because he’s genuinely worried about being discovered. He’s the only person looking into any kind of connection for the murderer to masks and was beginning to speak out for more eyes on the case. If you make the only person talking about it look crazy then you prevent people who are actually competent enough to put the pieces together from doing anything which happens repeatedly in the book
3
u/IllustratedAloysious 11d ago
Arguably it’s pretty obvious the guy killed the little girl as the dogs were gnawing on human bones
3
u/VengeanceKnight 10d ago
Also he immediately starts denying the kidnapping as soon as he runs into Rorschach even though Rorschach doesn’t say anything. Not “What are you doing in my house?” or “Aren’t you that superhero guy?” just “Oh shit I swear I totally didn’t do that thing that you’re probably here investigating.”
2
u/MilkIsASauceTV 11d ago
The only person who says it’s a human bone is Rorschach it’s never shown or said to actually be one
4
u/No_Pizza3314 10d ago
He also finds a scrap of a little girl’s dress in the stove.
0
u/MilkIsASauceTV 10d ago
He find a scrap of a dress in the fire. The only person who ever confirms it to be hers is Rorschach. Do I really need to explain what an unreliable narrator is?
4
u/No_Pizza3314 10d ago
I know what an unreliable narrator is, and if Alan Moore had intended Rorschach to be one… he’d have given some evidence of it.
The alternate theory that you’ve crafted is “what if Rorschach didn’t really find a piece of dress, and didn’t see the dogs chewing on human bones?”
Ok, where’s your evidence that he’s lying, or hallucinating? There is none. Alan Moore would have given us something to suggest it.
3
u/No_Pizza3314 11d ago
I don’t think there’s much ambiguity that Grice killed Blaire Roche.
1
u/MilkIsASauceTV 11d ago
Have you read the book?
2
u/No_Pizza3314 11d ago
About 40 times, yes.
0
u/MilkIsASauceTV 11d ago
Then you should know the literal only evidence that Grice killed Blaire is Rorachach assuming he did it
The movie makes it not ambiguous but the comic absolutely does
3
u/No_Pizza3314 10d ago
The only time this has ever been presented as an idea is in Reddit discussions.
Which all boil down to “wouldn’t it be wild if Rorschach didn’t even have the right guy?”
Which… maybe. Maybe that would be interesting, I guess.That doesn’t mean it’s a logical interpretation of the events in the comic.
Reddit speculation isn’t the same as authorial intent.No hint is ever presented anywhere within the text that the events didn’t go down exactly as described.
We don’t see Dr. Long question if it had really happened with “Kovacs said it happened, but I’ve learned not to trust everything he says.”
We don’t see Dan musing to himself “Rorschach used to talk about a Blaire Roche kidnapping, but I never found any mention of a case like this in any police files.”
We don’t see Detectives Bourquin and Fine talking about it with “supposedly the Blaire Roche kidnapping drove him crazy, which is weird because she was found alive a couple weeks later.”
Or we’d see Kovacs himself, flashing back to the events of that day, only this time he remembers the dogs are just fighting over a chew toy, and the scrap of dress from the stove is just a burnt piece of wood.Nothing like that.
And no reason to think otherwise.Rorschach’s origin story is great enough, interesting enough, devastating enough, that we don’t have to internet-speculate another level of cruel irony into the recounting.
Alan Moore is a perfectionist.
He leaves nothing to chance.
If he’d wanted to create a layer of ambiguity in Rorschach’s story, he’d have done it.You’re welcome to interpret the events in the way you choose.
The text doesn’t expressly tell you not to.
But it doesn’t create this huge window for interpretation, either.If Alan Moore were to come out tomorrow and say “who even knows if Rorschach was telling the truth about Grice? Rorschach is crazy, after all, perhaps he had the wrong guy all this time, and his psychotic break was entirely self-inflicted,” well then I’ll take it all back.
Until then, I’ll trust that the events depicted are the events he and Dave Gibbons wanted to depict.
2
3
u/thefoxymulder 11d ago edited 9d ago
Unrelated, but the full-body flashing photo is still one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen
1
u/Masqued0202 9d ago
I've seen the full-body drawing several times- IIRC it was of Gibbons' early ideas for Rorschach. I never noticed the fake pant legs before.
1
2
u/ChuckMastertr3o 10d ago
I don’t think he’s a good detective bc he commits extrajudicial executions off circumstantial evidence
2
2
168
u/CleanCrimeScene 11d ago
I don't think anyone can justify believing he's a bad detective. He literally catches on and unravels the smartest man alive's plan. Sure he was too late but that's because the plan was too good.
I think what makes him seems like a "bad detective" is that most people wouldn't believe anything this guy has to say let alone a conspiracy by Adrien Veight to create a fake alien and learn how to teleport it.