this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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I cant see Ozymandias as a good guy. At all. None of the "heroes" are, but Oz was the worst of them.
I should re-read it, but the impression I got was that Oz was the epitome of this thread's topic. A real "ends justify the means" villain, where his end goal is to save the world from itself by giving it a common enemy to vanquish. And he does it. In terms of the classical trolley problem, he pulled the lever to kill 1 instead of doing nothing and allowing 5 to die. Am I misremembering?
That's roughly right, but that doesn't make him in any meaningful way "good". Of course I also don't think anyone who decided to drop the bombs on Japan was a "good guy". But maybe that's why I'm not a pure utilitarian.
From what I understood, he spent the whole story acting super-sure about what would happen if he did nothing, and how he alone could fix it. But in the end of the comic, this showed he had doubts. Veidt didnt have precognition, just very good prediction. But also an over-inflated ego. He killed a lot of people for a "maybe".
Man, such great writing. Yeah, definitely going to have to reread it.
In the movie the only one I would've considered good was Rorschach. He was the only one who only made personal sacrifices to save people.
I mean dude legit let himself be killed because he couldn't live with not telling the world what Ozymandius actually did.
Rorschach being good is debatable, he's a Batman like vigilante who hasn't the 'no killing' rule, which is dubious.
But the reason he chose death was (in my humble opinion) that he realized Veidt had found the solution, that would bring peace and create a world he would be useless in.
This point is made by the ultra nationalist frontiersman publication he sent his diary to. They complain that they have nothing to write about as the world was united in boring peace, this is when the burger munching intern gets the assignment to pull something out of the loonie pile.
Veidt would never consider himself the good guy for what he did, but I think that's what makes the writing so excellent.