Sunday, January 13th, 2008...8:17 am
Death Note Revisited: The eternal battle between good and evil
As if heroes and villains were so straight forward, if only the world was black and white. Anyone who reads comic books will know that a hero’s path is never a simple one. When I first watched Death Note, I always thought of Light as the villain of the story. Light is our narrator in to the crime ridden world in Death Note. In traditional storytelling, it is often the hero who narrates the story, but here much to my surprise, it’s the villain who tells the story.
Death Note is one of those anime’s where you can’t sit on the fence, you have to pick a side. Some see Light as a hero, other’s as a villain, it all really depends on your point of view. I’ve seen a lot of anime but Death Note is one of those anime’s that kept me at the very edge of my seat. Never have I loved and hated the villain of a story so much. Every time L got closer, I kept wishing Light didn’t get caught, and every time Light killed I wished justice would prevail. This is the only anime that I have ever seen that has made me switch sides so many times. That is the power of Death Note.
I’m currently reading the manga and it’s nearly impossible to put down. The artwork reminds me of film noir. When Light meets Ryuk, I was surprised to see so many names were already written in the notebook, I remember being shocked. Somewhere at the back of my mind, I wanted to believe that he’s just a good kid really. A part of me didn’t really want to accept Light for what he really was – a serial killer.
Many people gave up on Death Note after L’s death, but for me, already addicted, I had to continue. Light ends up believing his own ideology, that he is a god of this new world, claiming he is doing what others are afraid to do. But if you go back to the beginning you realise all this started due to boredom. Ryuk, the Shinigami in an endless existence. Light the straight laced high school student bored out of his mind.
The most tantalizing question that Death Note left me with was: what happens next? Thinking back on it, Light had created a world with no war, and not even any government has ever done that. So what would a world without Light look like? I imagine crime would once again rise, society would resume and the world that Near would find himself in wouldn’t be that much different from our own. Somewhere along the way, many months after I watched the ending, I somehow came to the conclusion that perhaps Light really was the hero of the story after all. Was it wrong to want to create a better world?
For Light to really change the world, he couldn’t play by society’s rules, in essence, Light had to become the bad guy if he was to do any good. Was there any humanity in Light? It’s hard to tell. Just as he could dupe the other characters, he also worked his spell on me. When I saw the ending, I just knew that I was watching something special. I’m not sure if we’ll ever see another anime this compelling again, but Death Note is an example of what a good anime can really do.
2 Comments
January 13th, 2008 at 10:25 am
I think the thing about Light is that he is not evil, as such - as we see on the occasions when he doesn’t have the death note. At the start, and when he relinquishes it along with his memories, he becomes much more a standard protagonist. Part of the message here, then, is an old one - power corrupts. But of course, the power itself is not the thing at fault…
>”Was it wrong to want to create a better world?”
No. But the problem is the way he goes about it. For all that he’s supposed to be a genius, he’s still a child and he thinks like a child. Thinking about things logically, while the power to kill someone whose name and face (or just face, with Misa around) you know would certainly change the world, it wouldn’t eliminate crime or war. And, in fact, I don’t think it’d make the world a better place - living in a world subject to his whims is more like a dystopia than a utopia.
For all his delusions of grandeur, Light is nowhere near godlike. He isn’t omniscient, he has no way of knowing if people are really guilty of the crimes of which they’re accused or not (he relies on the police). And he has no means of punishment other than death, resulting in very black-or-white judgement.
So, rather than thinking that Light was good or evil whilst reading Death Note, more than anything I thought he was a bit dumb, a bit naive. Also, unlike most people, I wasn’t bothered who won out of Light and L, as long as the match was good - which it was ^^
January 19th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
The moral ambiguity is what I loved about Death Note. Even when the back and forth logic left me baffled, it threw up fascinating questions about right and wrong. What initially started off as two sides fighting evil and clashing against one another in the process was reduced to the said sides being motivated by their own egos. Light I think lost his humanity because he was corrupted by the power the notebook offered him - you could probably write essay after essay regarding the ethics of what he was doing, which is why I think it’s a very intellectual series that still offers less demanding entertainment value. Getting that balance right is difficult, but I think Death Note often pulled it off well.
It was a little drawn-out in the later chapters but I’ll always remember this as an unusual, thought-provoking and for the most part gripping tale.
Leave a Reply