In fact, in ending the Cold War and potentially ushering in a new era of international peace, he does more for society than all of them combined.
Manhattan, Nite Owl, The Silk Spectre, or any of the Minutemen. At the end of the day, he does more for society than Rorschach, The Comedian, Dr. He self-defined as an exceptionalist hero and thus saw escaping the bonds of conventional law and morality as a necessary step he never thought of himself a bad person, “Veidt his actions as upholding conventional order some must suffer for the benefit of all.” (Van Ness)Īnd now we arrive at the rub it’s so difficult to negotiate Veidt as a hero because while he shows the least moral fibre of any self-styled hero in Watchmen and manipulates, murders, and commits genocide, he accomplishes more actual, objective good than anyone else in the comic.
Like Nolan’s Batman, he believed he was offering his mind and spirit in sacrifice in order to create a better world. His perception wasn’t that his was an enviable task either, but a necessary one, as he spoke after his atrocity of the tremendous toll which it took on his mental well-being Veidt fancied himself a sacrificial figure. Not believing anyone else capable of saving the world from seemingly inevitable nuclear war, Veidt became “a self-appointed God-like figure, deciding to sacrifice 3 million lives for what he to be a positive and permanent change in the world.” (Van Ness) His feeling of t otal superiority led not only the creation of his heroic persona, but eventually to his master stroke, which was entirely predicated on that belief extended to the point that he perceived himself as the only one with the ability and the drive to save the world from itself. As a youth, he felt different from and “superior to his fellow man”, destined for greatness, and thus consciously “set out on a quest to become a hero” and “manufactured for himself (and the world), a heroic archetype” separate from his real self, Ozymandias. One of the key points which Van Ness makes to distinguish the actions of Ozymandias the hero from heroism is the incongruity between who Veidt is at his core and who he presents himself to be she says that he is a hero in appearance alone. In her book Watchmen as Literature, Sarah Van Ness argues that while publically, Veidt appears to be “a conventional hero who abides by all conventional rules and laws”, and while he has the “natural intelligence and unprecedented athletic ability” typically associated with superpower-less heroes, that Veidt’s actions in Watchmen “can’t be confused with Heroism” and I’m genuinely not sure whether or not I agree.
I find it interesting that while many regard Adrian Veidt- Ozymandias- as the villain of Watchmen, he probably fits the superheroic archetype better than anyone else in the graphic novel.
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