Akhenaten 🇺🇦🏴‍☠️

The message that you should be taking away from the HBO series, if you've truly honed your media literacy to a razor edge, is that its stupidity and ingratitude to the source material is a far better refutation of the original than its actual attempts at refutation. Moore comes from a cohort of decrepit old leftists who genuinely believed in their day that they could create a better world, and that doing so justified whatever means they used. You're not meant to self-insert into Veidt, sure, but you are supposed to be a good little Nite Owl and do nothing while this imaginary revolutionary saves the stupid world from itself. Intentionally or not, Lindelof depicted exactly the world that would come of this. Rorschach isn't believed in HBO's Watchmen, except by the right-wing fringe. Veidt won. Except... His "victory" achieved nothing. The world has sunk into a bitter malaise. The peace brought about by the "alien" attacks is held to, but society didn't improve in any way. Why was it written this way? Because the Cold War was long enough ago that even aging leftists like Lindelof forgot about it. Lofty causes like "prevent nuclear annihilation" are silly and out of date now, and leftists are rather embarrassed to have ever been associated with them. After all, we never had an alien invasion in real life, we never had superheroes, and yet nuclear war never happened. Capitalism won, the right wing won, America became absolute hegemon. All the things that Moore and his cohort said would usher in Doom did not. History just trundled on. And all that's left, in the case of the Watchmen, is a collection of characters who compromised their morals and made peace with evil. For the sake of a cause we now know was totally unnecessary. Everyone Veidt killed died for nothing. There was never going to be a nuclear war. And of course there was only one character who never compromised himself. You were supposed to spite him for it, and yes, you were supposed to assume that his principles led to disaster, but now we know they didn't. Now we know he was just the only one who had a spine. Under those conditions, you are going to have a very very hard time getting people to prefer a coward who killed millions for nothing to an "edgy neckbeard" who tried to save them.