link to original posting: http://moderatedamage.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-i-imagine-rorschachs-voice-when-i.html

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THIS IS NOT A RAGE POST ABOUT THE FILM VERSION! I only put the movie in at the start and end to give my interpretation of his voice some kind of reference. This thread is about going into the ideas behind WATCHMEN (the comic) and forming an opinion based on a complete and thorough understanding of the comic. The film has nothing to do with any of the actual intellectual ideas expressed within this post.

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This is an extremely long post for anyone who is genuinely interested in WATCHMEN so if you are going to complain about its length or harass me for writing this, please just leave now. We don’t want your kind here. This also isn’t a rage post about the movie; it’s about the comic and deconstructing Rorschach’s character in order to come up with a voice that makes sense for his personality.

Also, SPOILERS!

I want to start by saying that even though I despise WATCHMEN as a film in its current non-director's cut state, I thought Jackie Earle Haley brought an interesting take on Rorschach. While it was a good voice, it's not exactly the way I envisioned Rorschach speaking. It is extremely difficult to put to words what something you imagine actually sounds like, which is why only the best authors can vocalize what they mean and most people just allow something an actor brought to life to be their definitive version because they can’t describe what they imagined. I am going to try my best to describe what my interpretation of Rorschach's voice is, and I'd appreciate comments on my take as well as your own ideas.

Rorschach's voice to me represents much more than a raspy “Christian Bale Batman” when I read WATCHMEN. It describes his entire character, summing up his world view, personality and physical state. Let’s take into account all of the traits of his voice in the comic.

Rorschach

Another of Rorschach’s qualities which most people don’t pick up on is the fact that when talking to other people he speaks in sentence fragments, but when writing in his journal he uses more complete and well-constructed sentences. He is trying to speak like he’s jotting down notes in a journal but he writes in his actual journal like he’s producing an essay. Granted, his journal writings aren’t perfect either but they’re definitely more complex than his speech. This habit suggests two things, the first being that he is obsessed enough to intentionally go out of his way to speak like he’s writing in a journal. This kind of dedication to literally change your speech into something you know is socially unacceptable is only demonstrated by people who are mentally unstable enough to follow through with it. The other thing this habit does is reinforce Rorschach’s detachment from society. He feels more comfortable in his journal than he does when speaking to real people. The only people he deems worthy of seeing his true thoughts are, as we later find out, the staff of The New Frontiersman. This is curious, as they would no doubt publish it in their newspaper where everybody can see it anyway, which makes this aspect of his character much more complex.

Rorschach's Journal. Notice the more fleshed out sentences than in...

Another quality to Rorschach’s voice is the jagged nature of his speech bubbles when he is in costume. When his costume is removed however, his speech reverts back to being in normal speech bubbles. This is another strong indicator about Rorschach’s character, because he gets all his confidence when he dons his costume (a theme that spans the entire comic with all of the characters) but it also serves as the groundwork for later in the comic when he is in prison. He finds out when forced to deal with dangerous prisoners that he can be just as resourceful without the costume, which may have been the first step in his progression to humanity. Ironically, his change to relative sanity began in the prison, but no thanks to the Dr. Malcolm Long, who began descending into Rorschach’s state of mind by the end of his issue (if you pay attention to the way he writes in his journal his sentences at the end of the chapter are much more disjointed and to the point than they were when the chapter started).

Rorschach's speech. The last panels aren't his journal, either. Notice the fragmented sentences.

All of these traits should be expressed in Rorschach’s voice, but not only passively. His character should be actively understood to its fullest in order to be truly represented on film. That’s why I got into all the themes behind his voice’s traits and kind of got off topic by going into general themes of the comic, because any great actor should ‘exist’ as his character, and not just take things at face value.

To contrast the film version of Rorschach with the one I’ve fleshed out here, he constantly flares his voice (they seemed to have switched Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach in the film because Rorschach shows a lot of emotion while Dr. Manhattan shows hardly any). He also speaks like Rorschach when he is out of costume in the prison, which also goes against the comic version. A curious addition to the film was the ‘ink bleed’ effect on Rorschach’s mask, which actually did add gray to his mask, pretty much going against everything Rorschach stood for. (Also “it never ends” wasn’t even in the film, changing the entire meaning of everything, in addition to the other horrible change of making Dr. Manhattan kiss Laurie at the end instead of forgiving Dan. Another change in the film was having the first fight with Comedian and Veidt actually be told by Blake’s point of view and zooming out to a wide shot of the city with the detectives, killing the ‘in the trenches’ idea expressed in the comic.) They also turned his voice into an intense- at-all-times and always ready to fight kind of “superhero” instead of tired, unloved, unwanted “retired costumed adventurer.” Just to clarify here, I think Haley did a great job with the new Rorschach the film created, but it’s really the fault of the filmmakers’ for failing to catch onto these themes and turning Rorschach into a thematically inconsistent character.

This isn’t really a post about why I hate the film though, the real point was to explain how I imagine my Rorschach and get across some points from the comic that may have been overlooked to anybody interested in furthering their knowledge. I hope you enjoyed my little analysis of Rorschach and I will continue to put these out for anyone who wants a different perspective on WATCHMEN.

P.S. to everybody who points out that cutting the prisoner’s arms off was a better idea than cutting his throat, he didn’t have a saw in the comic! In the comic the guy was trying to use a blowtorch to cut the door down and the guy with his arms in the door was screaming. They were in a secluded part of the prison where guards may have heard them (since there was no riot in the solitary section and they didn’t know the guards were incapacitated by the screechers on Archie) so the guy took out a box cutter and killed the screaming prisoner so they could continue their work in peace and without getting caught. You can’t cut someone’s arms off with a blowtorch or box cutter! Stop saying it didn’t make sense in the comic please!

Just to clarify, inb4 why did you write so much about this, I just scrolled down to see how long it was, it’s not that important it’s just a comic, the movie was fine stop complaining, why do you have the movie icon as your GB picture if you hate it, nobody cares, or any such variations on these.

One minor spoiler for Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is contained in the last paragraph of this post.

Did you ever notice games don't need to be difficult anymore? And when I mention difficulty I'm referring to it the way most people understand it, based on the way people misjudge Prince of Persia. Difficulty the way I'm talking about it means frustration. I don't think games should be devoid of any sort of challenge, whether it be mental or physical, as that would be like a film having no conflict in the story. That's not to say that parts of a game with little to no challenge can't be fun as well, but at the risk of contradicting myself I'll touch on that subject later. Difficulty still exists in Prince of Persia, and probably more so than in other games. The difference between it and other games is the fact that it doesn't bring you to a menu screen and make you watch it load every time you die. Tell me, how many times did you actually fall off the edge or get into the 'kill move' by an enemy and need Elika to come save you? Probably a lot of times. Probably about the same amount of times as, if not more than in Mirror's Edge. But Mirror's Edge is considered by many to be difficult, partly because of the way it treats death. It's very 1990's and they failed to come up with a good reason to allow you not to break the immersion. The trial-and-error gameplay, as many people like to call it isn't actually trial-and-error, it just seems that way because you usually can't think fast enough to get out of a certain situation or jump to a certain building while doing the right move. That's the exact same way Prince of Persia is, you don't die because of unfair camera angles or anything like real trial-and-error gameplay would be, you just misjudge a jump or press the wrong button when doing acrobatics. The difference is Prince of Persia has adapted for a more modern age of gameplay and realizes it's entertainment for your home where it doesn't matter how many times you die, while Mirror's Edge just feels like an arcade port.

This brings me to the what I think the problem is with Mirror's Edge as a singleplayer game. First off, I admit I'm immensely underqualified to discuss this subject further as I've played nothing more than the demo and have seen many reviews and impressions of it. My point still stands however, because most people who talk about how hard it is for making you constantly die are basing this off of opinions of their first playthrough. Part of the problem is the fact that since you get a feeling of really doing parkour by being in the first person, having such a visceral sensation constantly ripped from your eager hands by dying makes you mad inside. You're mad not only for having to do the part over again, but because now it's no longer on a whim, dodging and weaving through things for the first time. It's just a routine now, pieces of the level constantly layering on top of each other until the next checkpoint is reached, just so you can repeat the process. From what I've played it feels like the game was made for the time trials first, and then for the story. This would explain the death screen, as in a time trial you expect to be dying a lot, learning a level's ins and outs, but in a single player narrative, we all die a little inside every time we do learn the ins and outs of a level, having tainted the first impression of everything it contains that we can never get back.

The question some might ask would be, "Why don't you just play it on easy mode first if you want everything to go perfectly?" My response would be, why do games need difficulty levels in the first place? Sure for something more like an arcade experience you would want something to be really challenging once you've learned how to play it, but I think most games serious about their narrative should tailor to you. By this I don't mean tailoring to how good you are at the game, as there should just be certain games where "You must be at least this good to play" and those should have tutorials outside of the canon of the game (bonus points for if they fit them into the canon). For example though, if in MGS4 when you're crawling on hands and knees through the microwave tunnel, would you have enjoyed it more if you had to keep doing it over, only because at the start you weren't pressing Triangle fast enough so by the end you hadn't pressed it enough times to continue? No, because now it's ruined. Everything that entire sequence stands for would be completely ruined. Kojima was smart enough to be able to tailor that part enough to make you feel like you're juuust about to fail, and then you get through it. That's real gamemaking. Games are all about what you feel while playing them, just like any other form of art. If all you feel is frustration at a level's difficulty, having to mute the TV's sound every time characters say "What's going on? What are they saying?" "They've started a bloody countdown! Zakhaev's going to launch the remaining missiles" because you've heard it 500 times already doesn't make it fun at all. If you are playing a game like Mirror's Edge where the intended feeling is to make you a freerunner, then it should have been trying its damndest to make you feel that way. I have no idea how they would have done that, but perhaps that means they should have gone back to the drawing board for how the narrative plays out in the first place.

I'd like to thank Giant Bomb user Shadow for inspiring this post.

Do games now even need to be difficult at all anymore? If you are from the NES generation I can see why you would think games should be confined to such a handicap, but if you think outside of the box for a second, what are games really? The cop-out answer would be to say that they are entertainment meant to stimulate the senses and challenge the user, hence the name 'video game'. I don't think games need to stimulate you at all, or at least not in the way they did in Contra or Street Fighter. I say you should look to films for a parallel, (and there's a difference between being a parallel to films in their historical progression and just trying to imitate feature films in content and structure) sure in the early days they needed to have some kind of real catch as to why people see them, like the fact that there was a faraway country with beautiful scenery or cutting-edge special effect for the time, but now those coexist with others meant more for your mind, and the medium is accepted as something that can feature content smarter than just eye candy. I think games should be able to stimulate your mind just as well as films can, in fact they have the potential to do it a lot better. The satisfaction you get from doing something in Half-Life 2 is seriously rewarding, and in the way that most games (note that most games besides HL2 use cutscenes- a handicap left over from trying to copy movies) can't replicate. The pure way of telling a story through this medium, one in which the user has at least a little bit of control over what happens, makes all the difference. Any part of Half-Life 2 could have played out in a passive medium such as films, but instead the fact that when a setpiece happens you affected it or when characters are talking, you, not a camera, are looking at them makes it so much more engaging. I have gone on record going so far as to say that games can't be successfully translated to film because film is an inferior form of storytelling. Of course stories made from the ground up as a film or even expertly adapted to one can be and are extremely effective, but games still haven't stopped trying to be half film, half interactive story. Half-Life 2 won't make a bad film because its story isn't good enough, it's because the amount of story gained from it is completely up to the user. Making this a static, and therefore boring sequence of images ruins the way the story in Half-Life 2 pans out. I stick to this statement.

I have also gone on record saying that our entire industry needs to change its name, since developers and people arguing about 'games as art' subjects have used the term 'video game' as a crutch to make their games hang onto bits and pieces of the 8-bit coin-ops of our past. The day when we wake up and realize that we don't need to make players pay by the death anymore is truly the day video games transcend their restrained roots.