Like multiple times it has characters have a turn to the camera moment where they say some shit like “Kira is absolutely right about everything, but oh woe, oh calamity, for he is breaking the law and doing the violence that only the state is permitted to do, oh but what a tragedy for the legal system is too soft and permissive, and the police state too friendly and lenient towards the underclasses and so Kira is a necessary evil!” and the narrator keeps having bits about how Kira’s policy of extrajudicially murdering everyone the state accuses of a crime is working and creating a gentler, safer world and it’s just so fucking bad.
Light is a monstrous little fascist dipshit with the dumbest plan anyone has ever had, and his ideology is fundamentally deranged and abhorrent. Like how the fuck does “so he’s changing the world, by just killing everyone accused of a crime after they’ve already been arrested and locked up!” even fit into anything but the most unhinged boomer brain as a solution to anything? His targets are almost exclusively people who are either innocent or who have already been neutralized and contained as a further threat, what does purging them accomplish? It’s just turbo fash dipshit stuff.
Light is just a dumber rehash of Batman’s League of Shadows foil that’s used to show that Batman, who agrees 100% with the League of Shadows’ entire ideology except for its inevitable logical conclusion, is actually Good and Pure and doesn’t do bad violence stuff because that’s the job of the police who get special good boy passes to do violence for the state.
Even the narrative itself doesn’t offer any criticism other than showing Light to personally be a vile, abusive piece of shit behind the mask he puts on around other people, and it emphasizes him fighting back against the cops who are after him as being this moral event horizon moment more than all the literal mass murder because the TV man told him to shit he did. So far as the story has a moral it’s this fundamentally reactionary liberal take about how the police state should be more repressive but it also shouldn’t go too far, and that violence is the job of state-sanctioned actors and not the public.
It was pretty entertaining as a suspenseful horror thriller though, and the “cerebral back and forth” shit with Light and L was incredibly funny because it was all just Light being a self-defeating dipshit digging himself deeper and deeper by being a bloodthirsty egomaniac and L running in circles around himself trying the rhetorical equivalent of a Wil E Coyote gag as bait.
It was pretty entertaining as a suspenseful horror thriller though, and the “cerebral back and forth” shit with Light and L was incredibly funny because it was all just Light being a self-defeating dipshit digging himself deeper and deeper by being a bloodthirsty egomaniac and L running in circles around himself trying the rhetorical equivalent of a Wil E Coyote gag as bait.
For me, the comedy came from the magical realism of the series. A bunch of supernatural old gods drop a book that kill anyone for humans to use, and the world keeps on churning and the humans are bogged down by bureaucracy, mundane investigations with real life tech and strategies, and boredom to the point that the shinigami and death note powers aren’t even shocking to anyone involved and just become annoying room mates. Reminds me of how COVID was collectively relegated to a minor annoyance and we should all just get back to work.
the narrator keeps having bits about how Kira’s policy of extrajudicially murdering everyone the state accuses of a crime is working and creating a gentler, safer world and it’s just so fucking bad
Narrator? What? The author is a weirdo, but I’m not sure how you got the impression that Light is portrayed as anything more than a pompous serial killer. The police is also portrayed as incompetent, considering they allowed a serial killer onto the investigation against himself, with the exception of a few people and private detectives; I’d argue L is closer to Batman than Light.
The literal narrator that cuts in in the anime, describing the setting and what’s happening, mostly to cover what seem like narrative timeskips IIRC.
I only remember one instance, when Light graduates and joins the police force. But even when I was a teenage reactionary idiot who supported him, I understood the narration to be how he views himself and not how the audience is supposed to view him because it matched his arrogance.
and that violence is the job of state-sanctioned actors and not the public.
Considering Ryuk warns Light that any human with the ability to kill eventually becomes corrupted, I don’t see how it supports this view. The police also give up on the investigation and try to appease Kira which causes the task force to essentially become vigilantes.
Like multiple times it has characters have a turn to the camera moment where they say some shit like "Kira is absolutely right about everything, but oh woe, oh calamity, for he is breaking the law and doing the violence
This does happen, but considering most of the characters in the show are literal idiots besides L, Near, and maybe Light’s dad, I think it’s a decent portrayal of how the normal, average person would view Kira.
Considering how the setting gets warped around him with huge swathes of the public just spontaneously embracing his particularly brand of dipshit fascist thought it definitely feels like the narrative is that diegetically his ideas work, because they are written to work, and it just ends up coming across as tonally incoherent reactionary wish fulfillment, like the guilty fantasies of a reactionary liberal who still thinks of themself as a good person because they hedge it in “ah, but that’s going too far and even worse that’s illegal!” getting mixed into the horror thriller stuff where Light is every bit as vile as the real people who share his ideals.
I’d argue L is closer to Batman than Light.
Like I said, Light’s the League of Shadows, Batman’s foil that holds up a mirror that says “this is you, this is what you believe, this is what your worldview actually entails isn’t that fucked” and gets shut down with “yes, it is, but I’m better and as a responsible member of society I leave the deadly violence to official state-sanctioned actors!”
Also L is more Wil E Coyote as Sherlock Holmes than Batman. Batman’s a silly nepobaby vigilante, L is a galaxy brained reclusive nerd.
Considering how the setting gets warped around him with huge swathes of the public just spontaneously embracing his particularly brand of dipshit fascist thought it definitely feels like the narrative is that diegetically his ideas work
Do you think this is so far off from how the real public would react? Billions of people pray to their gods, and now some guy is able to show that he has the power to kill anyone anywhere, I imagine this would cause such a rift in the public’s mental wellbeing than encountering an alien. The US has a literal kill list (deposition matrix), the closest you’ll probably get to a death note, and no one bats an eye
And his ideas do not work. Crime is “reduced,” but the show also explains that the world lives in absolute fear and zealous reverence to do anything let alone commit a crime. Maybe that’s the author’s ultimate dream, but I don’t think anyone with a critical mind and who truly believes the motto “if you choose security over freedom, you deserve neither” would see this as a positive outcome. Also, L and his cohorts are shown to be intellectually superior from the getgo, and they either ultimately win, or continue to oppose Light and the usage of the death note.
I couldn’t make it past the first episode of the anime and turned it off after 10 minutes. I liked the live-action Japanese movie, though. Never watched the Netflix version.
pretty entertaining as a suspenseful horror thriller though, and the “cerebral back and forth” shit with Light and L was incredibly funny because it was all just Light being a self-defeating dipshit digging himself deeper and deeper by being a bloodthirsty egomaniac and L running in circles around himself trying the rhetorical equivalent of a Wil E Coyote gag as bait
I end up watching the angry birds video every time this comes up, the tubular bells knockoff soundtrack kicking in has me
every time.I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I thought Near’s final speech to Light demonstrated pretty succinctly that Light is just a serial killer who latches onto justice as a means of justifying it to himself and others.
I do wish that the anime delved deeper into the idea that Light wasn’t any sort of god in practice, rather he was just carrying out the will of capitalist police institutions all over the world. At no point in Light’s process does he ever personally investigate any of his victims’ innocence or lack thereof. But it is somewhat present in the subtext, it’s the reason why Light loses to Near in the long run. Like, this idiot has the full backing of the United States plus supernatural death god abilities, but he still loses to a twelve year old leading a defunct CIA offshoot.
In the end, Light is exposed as a total fraud, just a garden variety fascist hog who unfortunately comes across a magical WMD. When he’s caught, he goes on an embarrassing meltdown in front of all his closest “friends” who he spent years manipulating, pathetically begs Ryuk to save him like Rem did, runs off with multiple gunshot wounds, and finally dies when Ryuk writes his name in the Death Note.
I do wish that the anime delved deeper into the idea that Light wasn’t any sort of god in practice, rather he was just carrying out the will of capitalist police institutions all over the world.
Yeah, the thing that’s really getting to me is that he’s fundamentally just being a cop, he’s the police state given paracausal powers, he’s just amplifying and further facilitating the existing system, and it narratively treats him as something entirely distinct and at odds with the system. It portrays him as an aberration, some sort of independent monster who’s going too far, when he’s not something unique or external at all: he’s literally a cop brat, his worldview is that of the police state he exists in, his actions are the same violence that that system is enacting.
And it just doesn’t connect these concepts at all. It’s a detective story, it’s a monster story: Light is something inhuman and outside the world’s context, instead of a product and reflection of the system he aspires to be a part of and later is literally a part of. I think it also makes him too charismatic and good at masking his true thoughts in a way that contradicts how impulsive, violent, and arrogant he is, but that’s kind of a narrative necessity: if he couldn’t hide it he’d have gotten caught immediately, even if a real Light would have been an unstable rage demon who’d probably end up with a substance abuse problem to deal with the stress and trauma and him being Kira would have been an open secret to everyone around him who kept quiet because they were either afraid or agreed with him.
As usual with anime there’s little to no analysis of the wider society in which the characters exist and how their actions are influenced by it and how they, in turn, influence it.
If you want to be just as frustrated in the same way, watch Psycho Pass. But you jave to watch until the season 2 finale for your blood to boil to maximum.
Been a while since I watched the series but I remember being beat repeatedly with a stick that had “absolute power corrupts absolutely” spelled out in glitter and broken glass.
Yeah, it has exactly the wrong criticisms. Like Light’s actions are just cop shit, he’s being a cop and doing cop violence, just magically. He is fundamentally exactly the same in that regard as the system he exists in and operates alongside. Light is bad because his ideas are bad, and what makes it tragic is that he’s able to act on those ideas. But the story seems way too sympathetic to and uncritical about his ideas, and way too focused on how bad his actions are. It’s all “bright kid, good sense of justice, but too far!!!” instead of “this kid is a fascist dipshit with fundamentally twisted core beliefs, and these actions are just a slight escalation of the existing police state and its own excesses.”
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