If there is one thing important to know about me, it's that one of my favorite series of all time is the anime and manga series Death Note.
I love this series for many, many reasons. For one, it's stylistically stunning, with various gothic and visual kei influences that make the art style of the characters, animation, and even manga covers stand out amongst many other anime and manga series from the early to mid-2000's. The music in the anime is nothing to sneeze at, either, whether it be the hardcore metal opening theme songs, the chilling choir of chanting to raise the viewer's blood pressure, or the iconic piano as L and Light play their game of mental gymnastics to trick one another for their own benefit. The story itself is also incredibly compelling — the concept of giving a seventeen-year-old boy genius the power to kill people with a notebook is both fascinating and terrifying, and double that with putting him in a game of cat and mouse with the greatest detective in the world, the tension that is built up throughout Death Note is a feast for the brain.
There are many people who agree with me about loving this series. According to AniList, Death Note's anime adaptation from 2006 is listed as the third most popular of all time across the site — an impressive feat, especially since it's beat other iconic animes like One Piece, Naruto, and My Hero Academia, all cultural phenomenons in their own right. Even though the manga and anime series are both long finished, Death Note still holds its place dearly in many people's hearts over a decade later, including mine.
The series is so beloved, in fact, that it revives itself into popular culture every once in a while. In 2017, for example, Netflix tried to adapt the story into a live action film — which was received extremely poorly by fans and critics alike. However, flops like that are nothing compared to the overwhelming love people have for Death Note; earlier this month, Bandai Namco released DEATH NOTE Killer Within, an online party game akin to Among Us where players can play as various roles, complete tasks and events, and live the harrowing experience of deception and anxiety portrayed in the original anime and manga. In less than two weeks since the game's release, Killer Within has received hundreds of positive reviews on Steam, and having played the game myself, I have to agree that it's a really fun and new way to immerse yourself in the world of Death Note (sans the wannabe edgy and crude teenage boys in the voice chat, perhaps).
With the way that Death Note stays so close to the top, in and outside of the anime and manga spheres, it's no wonder that people become new fans of the series all the time. I, myself, have introduced many friends of mine to the series, and they have introduced it to their other friends, and so on. I personally browse online anime communities, particularly on Tumblr, to enjoy the many fan works that people are still making for Death Note as well as to see people talk about their experience watching or reading the series for the first time.
The latter is always fun, especially because I get to say "I know something you don't know" to myself when these newbies are introduced to something, like new characters or entering a new arc, in which I know how it all ends. However, somewhat recently, I came across the following post from Tumblr user beatcroc that fascinated me:
When I saw this post, I was intrigued about this parallel described by beatcroc. It's true that the gods of death known as shinigami (or, as beatcroc calls them, the "skull demon guys") look like textbook evil. As I've previously mentioned, the aesthetic choices made in Death Note are based in gothic and visual kei, and that really comes across in the character designs for the shinigami in the series. As seen in the design of Ryuk, when the audience first meets him — as well as the many other of the shinigami that appear throughout Death Note — they may feel a sense of dread and fear of what the shinigami are capable of and how their actions may affect the plot. Even the title "shinigami" is unsettling; for those of us who are well versed in supernatural and paranormal Japanese media, shinigami are a fairly common threat amongst the broad strokes of these genres. With the name of the series being Death Note, and gods of death being who we are first introduced to upon entering the world of the series, it's a common notion on first viewing of Death Note to believe that these characters are the ones we are supposed to be afraid of.
Compare Ryuk's appearance with that of the main character that the series follows, Yagami Light. Even though I know Light is the antagonist of Death Note, it's always off-putting to see him before he began the worst of his murder spree. How could a guy so plain, so normal, be evil in any sense of the word? The scariest thing about Light, at least when he's first introduced, is that he's a seventeen-year-old boy genius towards the end of his years in high school. Other than that, as mentioned in beatcroc's Tumblr post, Light is mild mannered, he cares about his family and doing good in school, and he wants to grow up to be like his dad. A classic goody two-shoes, as some may say, and as many may believe in their first viewing of Death Note — even when Light receives the namesake of the series.
However, this distinction of the appearance between a shinigami and a human is superficial. While it's true that, yes, the appearance of the shinigami makes them feel evil and dangerous, and the appearance of Yagami Light makes him seem good and safe, that is the beauty of Death Note's visual storytelling. These appearances lure the audience into a false sense of security because we already know what to expect, don't we? The shinigami is going to manipulate the situation and force the human to do something he doesn't want to do. If you've seen the 2017 live action adaptation, that's exactly what happens, after all, as seen in this clip from the film:
As wonderful of a job Willem Dafoe and his voice acting do to make Ryuk a truly terrifying creature from another realm, this version of Ryuk is nothing like the Ryuk from the original source material, which is frustrating as someone who loves Death Note as much as I do. It's part of the reason I have refused to watch this adaptation since it was announced, and why I wanted to write about it in the first place.
The beauty of the distinction in the appearances of the shinigami and the humans portrayed in Death Note are not, and have never been, a way for the audience to visualize what "evil" is. In fact, it's a red herring to make the audience think they know what is going to happen, before it's immediately turned on its head, a common occurrence throughout the entirety of the series.
Death Note, as a series, talks at length about what "evil" is. During his first appearance in the series, Light describes the world around him as "rotting" away. This "rot" comes from criminals, preying on innocent people in various dubious ways. Since Light is the son of a police chief, it only makes sense that he would be acutely aware of the rise and fall of the crime rates around him. There's even the possibility that some people in the audience agree with him.
Ryuk is, in some regard, Light's narrative foil, or opposite. Because he is a shinigami, Ryuk does not care about humanity, unlike Light, who obviously cares about humanity enough to call the rising crime rates in Japan "rot". Ryuk is also unserious and goofy, while Light is not. Ryuk is a god of death, and Light is just a mortal human. The two of them are nothing if not completely opposite from one another.
When Light gets a hold of the titular Death Note, a notebook that gives him the supernatural ability to kill someone just from writing down their name, we start to see his downfall. Light, with all of his hatred for the rising crime rates in Japan, wants to make a change in the world around him. His initial goals before getting his hands on the Death Note were to follow in his father's footsteps and become a police officer to fight the crime rates, but this idea is quickly put aside, as the Death Note offers a far quicker alternative to making tangible change in the world around him.
When Light meets Ryuk, who dropped the notebook on Earth in the first place (out of boredom, mind you), Ryuk is surprised that, in the five days since picking up the Death Note, Light has written hundreds of names — more than any other human who has had their hands on a Death Note has ever written, according to Ryuk. Light then explains his idea that the world is rotting, and tells Ryuk that he is killing brutal criminals and other neerdowells that he believes the world is better off without. Then, most worryingly, Light says the following:
I'm going to make the whole world know I'm here...that somebody is passing righteous judgement on them!! And then nobody will commit crimes anymore. The world will start to become a better place. [...] I'll make this a world inhabited only by people I decide are good. [...] I'm a serious, straight-A student...a model teenager. And I will reign over the new world.
— Death Note, volume 1, chapter 1, p. 43-45
For any seventeen-year-old to say anything even remotely like this is concerning on its own, but when that same teenager has the unchecked ability to kill hundreds of thousands of people just by writing their name down, Yagami Light's actions go from scary to downright terrifying.
Light's ideal world doesn't become corrupted, but is corrupted from the get-go; as Ryuk says in the same section that I've quoted above, if Light were to carry out his plans to create a new world in this way, Light would be the only bad person left. With how the shinigami are unbothered by the ethics of humanity, as shown throughout the rest of Death Note, it's somewhat profound that even Ryuk can recognize early on that Light is not a good person and point that out to him. Regardless, Light is stubborn, and continues with his plan to create the new world as he envisions it, kicking off the plot of the plot of the series.
As the series and plot moves forward, the audience sees time and time again what Light's version of a new, "good" world, free of "rot", actually looks like. Yes, he may still be killing criminals, but he's also killing off people that stand in his way. When he is followed by Raye Penber, an FBI agent sent to track the Yagami family on the detective L's orders, Light forces Raye to kill all twelve FBI agents in Japan on the case, including Raye himself, by tricking him into using the Death Note. When Raye's fiancee, Naomi Misora, gets too close to discovering the truth of how Raye died and who Kira is, Light makes her give him her real name so he can kill her, too. These are both instances that happen within the first month of Yagami Light being in possession of the Death Note.
If your goal is to great a new world with "good" people, then why are people who are rightfully trying to solve a string of murders turning into targets? Are "evil" people truly criminals, or are they just people that don't stand in Light's way? What is "good" and "evil" in Light's new world?
Do not get me wrong in saying that Ryuk is not, at least partially, to blame for these events. Ryuk was bored, so he dropped a Death Note into the human world in the hopes that something interesting would happen, and Yagami Light just so happened to be the one to pick it up. Ryuk, time and time again, claims that watching Light do what he does throughout Death Note is entertaining. But this, of course, brings more questions as Death Note continues: what's worse, committing murder or letting a murder happen? Ryuk is the one to kill Light in the end, when Light inevitably gets caught at the end of the series, so does that redeem Ryuk's inaction? Does any of that even matter when shinigami do not abide by human ethics in the first place?
The concept of "evil" is abstract at best, and can go down many different roads in how it manifests in media, but the subversion of expectations in Death Note about visualizing evil versus acting on evil is something I find unique in the way the series pulls it off. This, amongst the many other aspects of Death Note that I love, are some of the reasons I love the series as much as I do.
This is all fascinating to me, to think about the first impressions of characters in the media we enjoy. When I was a tween watching Death Note for the first time, I remember waiting for the shoe to drop — for the shinigami to end up being the textbook version of "evil", because that's what their appearance told me they were. But now, as I rewatch Death Note with a close friend of mine for the first time in a few years, nothing brought me more dread in episode one than seeing Light for the first time, talking about how the world around him was rotting away and seeing the titular notebook fall from the sky.
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