Laurie is a (mostly) useless idiot throughout the entire story.

I recently completed another reread of Watchmen, and while I love the series even more than when I first read it 15 years ago, this last readthrough really showed me how terribly Laurie is written (at least compared to the rest of the core cast). All she exists to do is break up with Jon, dump on Rorschach/the Comedian (which gets kind of hilarious later), get Dan laid, and basically convince Jon that life is worth preserving because he thinks manic pixie dream girls are hot, I guess. Her whole "arc" of realizing the Comedian is her father only works because Jon knows what he's going to know before he knows it, since otherwise there's no way he could have realized Laurie was repressing such a revelation. And there's not even any buildup! We never see her try to find her real father, because that would mean giving her agency outside of clinging to a man! So much yikes, Mr. Moore. So very much yikes.

As for why I call Laurie an idiot...well, it's not all her fault. Laurie was clearly pushed into this line of work by her mother, and at sixteen she fell in with Jon, who more or less attended to her every need. In short, it's clear Laurie is in an arrested state of mental and emotional development. She never needed to be anything more than a superhero (or Jon's handler), so it makes sense she would gravitate towards Dan and eventually slip back into old habits. But then she boards Dan's ship and ACTIVATES THE FLAMETHROWER WHILE TRYING TO LIGHT HER CIGARETTE. Like, why!? Why where you in there, Laurie!? Why did you need to light up INSIDE OF THE DEADLY AIRSHIP!? And then, at the end of the series, she contemplates adopting a costume not unlike the Comedian's costume, complete with a gun. And I'm like...what? Dude! Even if you've come to terms with the Comedian being your dad, he was an awful person! And this is who you want to model yourself after!? Also kind of weird she wants a gun so bad when her one badass thing she did was shooting Adrian, and it didn't even work because he caught the bullet. Obviously most people aren't going around catching bullets, just weird how that didn't discourage her from pursuing further firearms.

I'm not trying to say no thought went into her character. All of the core cast parallel each other in some key ways, and Laurie is no different. While I don't love her relationship with Jon, Laurie's dependency on others mirrors Jon's feeling of being trapped in all points of time simultaneously. I think part of why they related to one another was that neither felt in control of their lives, and their infatuation blossomed into what I can only call sexual determinism. I also believe Laurie's childhood parallels that of Rorschach, of all people, since they both idolized their absent fathers to the point of delusion. Whereas Rorschach needed to believe his father was an aide to Harry Truman, since in Rorschach's mind that's the only logical reason his father would leave him with an abusive and uncaring mother, Laurie needs to believe Hooded Justice is her father out of a subconscious need to supplant her actual father with an acceptable role model. These parallels establish Laurie as a hopeless romantic (much like Dan) and someone with little to no self-image, which is compellingly tragic. And it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth when I see Laurie glomming onto the Comedian's identity at the end. Either she didn't scope on how terrible Edward Blake was outside of the whole attempted rape thing, or she doesn't care. Neither possibility is of much comfort.

And yeah, this isn't just a Silk Spectre problem. I'm not calling Alan Moore a misogynist, but in my opinion, this book hates women. Pretty much all women in Watchmen are written as whiny, vapid, and shallow, and only tend to exist to further a male character's journey. They also exist in such a way that their relation to sex defines their entire character. Rorschach's mom was a bitter sex worker who intentionally got mixed up with dangerous pimps, Sally and Laurie are largely defined by who they sleep with, Malcolm Long's wife uses lack of sex as a cudgel against him as he gets wrapped up in the Rorschach case, and Joey gets into a brawl with her ex after confessing to wanting to sleep with her (and be straight, but I don't even know how to start peeling back the layers on that onion). We also have Rorschach's landlord defaming his character for money, which isn't inherently sexual, yet I feel like showing us her many children implies the reoccurring paradigm of "loose whore wants to shake a man down for money so she can feed her kids without having to work." A former coworker once told me she could never get into Watchmen, and...yeah, this most recent reading helped me see why. When Watchmen works it works, but when it doesn't it's like reading an incel forum.

In conclusion, if you love Laurie as a character and haven't seen the 2019 Watchmen series, go watch the 2019 Watchmen series. Think what you will of the show as a whole, but Laurie is written so, SO much better in the TV series than in any of the comics.