I think the ending is one of the things that worked well in 1987 but doesn’t today. At the height of the Cold War it was possible to argue that a million dead people might be an acceptable price to pay for an end to the Cold War and the possibility of billions of deaths. So Veidt, arguably, was a genuine hero and the others (with one exception) could at least see his viewpoint even if they didn’t agree with his having acted on it. And readers felt the same ambiguity - was Ozymandius a villian or just a very ruthless hero?
Then in the real world, the Soviet Union collapsed on its own within five years. Now there was no justification for blowing up New York and Veidt was retroactively seen as a clear villian and readers were wondering why the others couldn’t see it. And this was before the next major shift in 2001 - nobody nowadays is going to consider the possibility of blowing up NYC the same way they looked at it in 1987 or 1995.
Works of fiction stay the same but the world moves on.
I’d say no. The others were heroes - Manhattan was a “superhero”. By being so far above the other heroes, Manhattan forced them to confront the way they were seen by regular people. Manhattan treated the heroes the way they treated everyone else.
That perspective was necessary. Comic book readers obviously tend to see things from the superheroes point of view - we read about Superman or Spider-man not the people in the street who are looking up and watching them fly by overhead. In order to see a world in which there are superheroes realistically, we need to see it from a non-superhero viewpoint. And as I wrote above, Manhattan made that possible.
The difference in Watchmen is that, with the abrupt departure of Dr. Manhattan, MAD fails, deterrence breaks down and everyone - from President Nixon to the newstand guy who wishes the kid would just buy the damned pirate comic book already - believes that a global thermonuclear war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. is truly imminent, as the Comedian had foreseen 20 years earlier. 9-11 would be a picnic compared to that. Veidt cuts the Gordian knot - at a terrible price, to be sure, but a devastating, perhaps species-ending war is nevertheless averted.
I’m not defending what he did, but “the smartest man on the world” didn’t have five years to let the Berlin Wall fall, assuming it even did on his Earth.
I’ll admit it’s been a few years since I read the book but my recollection was that the war crisis was revealed to have been part of Ozymandius’ plan. He set it up so the world would be right on the edge of a nuclear war when he launched his “invader”. Presumedly he figured a near war would scare the two sides into a closer alliance.
Yeah, Veidt arranged for Doc Manhattan to be ambushed during the interview, thus prompting the Doc’s departure. Veidt saw him as an obstacle for his plans to dominate the world and bring peace.
No, no. I’m with you on the “master plan” angle being brilliant. No doubt that was fantastic. I think that works on every level. Scare us into friendship. Shades of the rumors of FDR withholding info on Pearl Harbor to enter WW2. I think Ozy is the most interesting character in the book. His complex motivations in the face of Rorshach’s simplicity is fantastic.
I simply meant the big, honking space alien teleported into NYC. The mechanism (little more than a McGuffin) was what I found slightly odd.
Even then, it wasn’t TOO bad. It was the only common enemy that would unite the world.