I actually just finished reading Watchmen recently.
It's an interesting study of about a dozen types of guy, although I think Moore lays the synchronicity on a bit thick. It deserves its title as a classic.
I don't know what Alan Moore intended. I assumed that the "media literacy enjoyers" on Twitter/X are just compressing down a some statement somewhere to support their position.
Watchmen ends on a very interesting note: Dr. Manhattan tells Ozymandias that "nothing ever ends."
It isn't just the matter of Rorschach's journal escaping - Ozymandias put a predatory cat through the Integrity Field disintegrator. Dr. Manhattan survived disintegration the first time that happened to him. The cat could, too.
Ozymandias is very intelligent, but he is also self-aggrandizing. He is, genuinely, the smartest man on Earth, but in part because he has no peers to humble him, he is not the wisest.
Every problem falls to his analysis, and so the dimensionality of the world, the limitation of any one man's ability to control things, escapes him. He even outwits Dr. Manhattan.
What Ozymandias was supposed to do, what would have made him a legendary hero of history, but a more modest one, although the text doesn't say this and doesn't even imply it specifically, was use his immense intellect, charisma, and creative power to fully analyze the political situation, the political currents, the flows of power, emotion, and information, and broker a strategic arms limitation treaty.
He decided to trick the whole world, becoming a mass murderer in the process, because the idea of being above others, and not trusting them, was more flattering to him.
It is likely that Ozymandias will get away with his crime, and set the general view of the world, for about ten years. The act is so absurd and overwhelming that people will not think to question it. Although not certain, it is quite possible that he will be hanged in twenty.
Rorschach stinks, and he eats cold beans, partly because he's a strange dude, but also because he values his work far beyond how he values himself. He's hardly without flaws (see his defense of the Comedian), but essentially every waking hour, he's thinking about how he can punish the wicked for the harms they impose on others.
He's poor. He's ugly. He stinks. He's abrasive, and has very few friends. But he is completely dedicated to the mission, above all material things on Earth.
In this way, no matter his origins, or no matter what happens to him, so long as he never strays from the mission, so long as he never betrays his principles, he has dignity.
Ozymandias will have his day, as befits his power - his gift.
The world will turn.
Rorschach may well win in the end.
One of the things I think makes Watchmen compelling to people is that Nite Owl is friends with Rorschach and cooperates with him. Most people are not like Rorschach. Most people of the world, the good people who are responsible for bulk of good activities, are much more like Nite Owl. Nite Owl can see that Ozymandias has 'gone off the deep end' to a degree. He is horrified at the destruction that takes place.
Twenty years from then, he will likely be asked to testify. But in that moment, Ozymandias is dazzling. Nite Owl cannot see a future in which Ozymandias is found guilty and hanged for his crime. He is, well, pretty normal. For that reason, I take him as the audience's perspective character.
Rorschach is on a different level. Through Nite Owl, the audience can feel that even if they don't have Rorschach's courage, they could still help him along the way.
