Quote Originally Posted by gbaji View Post
Which, of course, was why he had to die to protect the secret. We can debate the morality of Manhattan killing Rorschach (and it's kinda the point of the comic), but Rorschach's motivation for wanting to tell the world what really happened, was not at all out of some kind of misguided patriotism or "us versus them" mentality. He lived by an absurdly rigid moral code. That's what drove him. Watering that down by suggesting that he only cared about it because it was Americans who were killed and not some other nations citizens, totally steps on the message and weight of the scene (and its shock value). He was the moral absolutionist in the comic. That was the point. What was done was morally wrong by his rules (and arguably intended to be viewed that way by the readers). The rest of the heroes reluctantly accepting the result, is "wrong" as well. Rorschach is supposed to be viewed as the "one true hero" in the bunch (well, for heroes in this setting, of course), actually wiling to "do the right thing" regardless of the cost. And... well... he pays that cost.
The funny thing is that Alan Moore got incredibly pissed off at Rorschach's popularity in the post-Watchmen years. He envisaged Rorschach as a sort of real-life Batman, concluded (correctly) that such a person would be a psychopathic nutcase, and expected everyone to just dismiss him. When they didn't, he decided that his readers had missed the point.

The counterpoint – that yes, Rorschach is a psychopathic nutcase, but he's also the only one out of the supposed "heroes" who ISN'T willing to help cover up a giant exercise in terrorism and mass murder – seemingly never occurred to him. I guess it's to Moore's credit that he can do such a good job on a character he fundamentally disagreed with, but you really would have thought that at some point he might have considered that readers might sympathise less with the supervillain and more with the guy who gets murdered for refusing to go along with the supervillain's plan. But then, I suppose that tells you something about the way he sees the world.