V for Vendetta lost one of its most prescient elements, the government supercomputer Fate, in the process of being adapted to the screen by Lana and Lilly Wachowski in 2005. An instrumental part of the comic series, the Fate supercomputer, and its increasingly surreal relationship with the leader of the fascist UK government, Adam Susan, has only become more relevant since the comic's release.

First published in 1982 in the pages of the anthology comic Warrior, Moore’s allegory on the pitfalls of Orwellian information control has become eerily predictive in recent years. When the Wachowski sisters brought V for Vendetta to the screen nearly twenty-five years later, the omission of Fate robbed the film of some of the predictive power of Moore's original.

A Political World Turned Into a Hall of Mirrors

In V for Vendetta, the fascist government Norsefire, builds Fate as a means of turning the UK into an unparalleled surveillance state. Over time, Adam Susan, the head of the government, develops quasi-religious, erotic feelings for the machine. By excluding Fate from the film adaptation, the Wachowskis stopped short of recognize the role technology would play in the future of politics. While political dissents have subsequently adopted the film's version of V's iconic mask, it is Norsefire's Fate, a substitute for divine omniscience and infallibility, removed from justice, that most resembles Q, the conspiratorial internet poster who generated the QAnon movement.

Alan Moore Hates 'Superhero Logic'

In an interview with Screen Rant, Moore evoked the specter of his own allegory when discussing what he views as the harmful effects of “superhero logic” upon the culture:

I think that when you get that actually playing out in peoples’ political thinking, then you get something like QAnon. You get a completely invented, imaginary threat that we can only get saved from by a completely invented, imaginary hero. It’s when you’ve got the thinking that pervades third-rate superhero comics actually being allowed to govern consensus reality, the one that we all have to live in, that’s when you’re going to get things like the January the 6th Capitol Invasion, y’know?

V for Vendetta's eponymous character, terrorist revolutionary V, was conceived by Moore as a satire of the concept of heroism in V for Vendetta and the current QAnon-style of political discourse, where an unseen, “masked and heroic,” figure is celebrated as a force of justice. In a way, V becomes a mirror of his fascist adversaries in Norsefire, one of the many tragedies of the series.

ittedly, the Fate subplot in V for Vendetta may have been difficult to include in the context of a film adaptation, the way a future TV adaptation might achieve. Among the supercomputer's other purposes in the series, V hacks Fate's system in order to drive the infatuated Adam Susan insane with fabricated reciprocations of his “love”. Still, its relevance to how V for Vendetta's political narrative relates to contemporary politics makes the lack of its on-screen counterpart a detriment to the film adaptation. With the internet facilitating the spread of misinformation and rise of demagoguery, Alan Moore’s twisted classic comic V for Vendetta is still achingly relevant forty years on.