Girl Watcher

And here I'm going to add my little bit about watchmen...

The art blends right into the other superhero stuff of the time, bland and featureless, done on the quick and dirty in the Archie style, complete with occasionally gaudy colour palette. The prose sticks an elbow out from its superhero contemporaries though, by trying to read as a short story, while the others were still following the forties and reading like they were written by frantic four year olds for frantic four year olds. I could say that it's okay, it's memorable, it's provocative, but it's only *great* if you compare to the worst fiction has had on offer. Or I could go on about the utter train wreck of characterisation, where only the crazy guy makes any sense, but hey. That could have been on purpose. And it's one of the things that makes it memorable, trying to figure out why anybody did anything, and if it ever could have worked. So, to keep it short, I'm going to go with something I've seen no one else mention in all the blah blah blah about watchmen.

I've got a problem with the girls. It's a common problem, especially in speculative fiction, and I suppose I could say it's because most of the people writing and pubbing are male, but does that excuse never having *talked* to a girl before you attempt to write one?

The girls in watchmen exist for one reason. They're whores, period. Just a handy orifice. They are there simply for sex, whenever the males--and whichever male--wants it. And the males want it at the weirdest times. I'm not sure I've seen more bizarrely inappropriate sex scenes in a single work before. I just don't buy that any girl would be feeling remotely sexy in any of the situations where they suddenly tear off their clothes in this book. It seems to be a regular fantasy for Moore; it's also how he writes girls in Extraordinary Gentlemen.

That aside, it gets worse. We get a girl who was raped who then falls in love with her rapist. Again, I find myself wondering if Moore has ever actually spoken to a human. Any human. Because, I'll grant, while you might have complicated feelings for someone who abuses you, it's not complicated here at all. It's presented as perfectly normal, sweetly romantic even, and I guess it is, if you think the random accident of just having ovaries makes you an empty whorebot with nothing like brains or feelings.

And how does rape fit in, in a world where a twitch of a male eyebrow gets a girl to drop her drawers? Well, it doesn't. So, that explains how she can both be blamed for the mess, and completely ignore it.

So, to sum up, if you have no experience with something, say, gender and abuse, don't try to write it. You only embarrass yourself, and everybody else.

Keeping it short and oh so sweet...