At a really quite minor stretch, it could be dismissal, as in 'Ite, missa est' (Go, the congregation is dismissed) - the words which close a Catholic mass - and/or its implied action point thereon, 'Go be a missionary; you have your mission'.

And you thought she was just being cute and Genki Girl childlike!  (Not yet ruled out.)

Loud and over-emotional, Death Note's Misa-Misa appears not to have been blessed with much in the brain department.

Which is a shame, when she's up against the likes of Light, L and Kiyomi Takada and playing a deathly game as Second Kira. Yet she has one up on all of them, not to mention a splattering of NPA police officers and nearly all attendant Wammy House geniuses. Misa Amane survives. Moreover, she's never positively identified as Second Kira; let alone officially arrested, tried and punished for her crimes in mass murderer.

Which is more than Light Yagami manages.

Unlike both him and super-smart Teru Mikami, Misa contrives as well to be missing from the killing line-up in the Yellow Box Warehouse.

Though twice captured by Wammy detectives, and stalked by two others, she also sidesteps being murdered (directly or inadvertently) by them. Which again is more than can be said for top of her class Ms Grace herself, Kiyomi Takada, as well as usual suspects Yagami and Mikami, and their sometime stand-in Kyosuke Higuichi.

Alone of all the Kiras, Misa Amane gets to walk free at the end.

What happens next is all of her own doing, within her own control. Whether that's the dramatic suicide of the anime or the continuing on to world stardom as an actress and model, as per the live-action Death Note movies.

Not so stupid after all then.

Whether its in retribution, career, love, favours or contribution to the Kira case, Misa Amane rarely fails to achieve any goal for which she reaches.

Nobody who ever attacked her survives long enough to gloat in their assault. Her street assailant is taken out by a Death God (Gelus); her family's murderer is initially sentenced through due legal process then killed by Kira while in prison; Soichiro Yagami threatens her with a gun - he doesn't survive a Mafia bullet later on in the tale; her torturous captor L and his carer Watari are both slaughtered by a second shinigami Rem, again on Misa's behalf; Mello and Matt both stalk her, and they are killed within weeks by Kira and/or Kira supporters; while Takada tries to take Misa's man and ends up incinerated in a lorry.

Even Light Yagami, who exploited her constantly for years, finishes the epic crawling in sobbing indignity upon the floor, crying out for Misa in his death throes.

Not all of those were of Misa's doing, nor even at her instigation, but she's certainly left with nobody alive who so much at looked at her with ill intent.

Then you get her career. As anyone who has ever set out with a dream of fame and fortune may attest, it's not easy to achieve stardom, yet Misa Amane is utterly in demand for both acting roles and modelling assignments

In the Death Note live-action movies, Misa Amane's fame is ever-growing. By the fourth, Death Note: Light Up the NEW World - to be released in October 2016 - she is at the top of her career, a Japanese idol with a firm presence in the entertainment industry; a famous name known worldwide as an actress.

During the week that Misa's introduced into Death Note manga and anime, she's on the cover of Eighteen Magazine, apparently a popular journal for the Japanese fashionatas (presumably the youthful ones).

Misa-Misa set out for fame and fortune, and got it. On her terms too, as her demands that she not kiss the main romantic male lead in one of her movies demonstrates.

In fact, as the corporate arc unfolds, Misa's work on that film shoot close by Yotsuba Tower certainly helps with the rescue of Matsuda, then later the capture of Yotsuba Kira himself.

And let's not forget that it was Misa acting unilaterally that managed to force a confession from Higuichi. That was her contribution to the Kira case. No fuss; simply done; back within an hour or two with the evidence that the men had been searching for months to secure.

Not bad for someone supposedly without any wit or two brain cells to rub together.

Nor was that the only moment wherein Misa Amane proves more resourceful and calmly able to get what she wants than all else within the Death Note plot-line.

Half a dozen chapters pass before L narrows down his hunt for Kira to a single major suspect - Light Yagami.

Misa Amane manages the same in about a week and that's only because a few days pass between the broadcast of her tapes and the proposed meeting in Otaka.

Even unto the moment of L's death and, in passing his legacy to his Wammy House successors, through to the end of Death Note - at the staging of the Yellow Box confrontation seven years on - none of the Wammys succeed in positively gaining a confession from Light that he was indeed Kira. Nor the smoking gun evidence that would convict him of the crimes enacted in that persona.

Misa Amane pulled that one off within the same aforementioned week.

Granted she had foreknowledge of the Death Note and the handy boon of shinigami eyes at her disposal; but L and the Wammys had the entire world's political, military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies, plus experts in every field and academic discipline, ready to do their bidding, and/or the Mafia. L could also call upon criminal expertise in the shape of Aiber the Conman and Wedy the top cat burglar.

Misa Amane didn't have any of that. Therefore it was perhaps quid pro quo on such scores.

Moreover, Misa not only located Light, tracked him down to his home and got a confession to being Kira out of him, she did it all without a) Light finding out who she was and b) L knowing of her existence until she began repeatedly to be seen with Light himself.

In fact, we could go as far as to say it was only her association with Light Yagami which put Misa in the frame as Second Kira. But then again, she was only there because she insisted upon being Light's girlfriend and being openly known as such in public. The latter orchestrated entirely by Misa herself in a succession of surprise meetings outside his home, at his university and wherever else she could insert herself into his presence.

Outgunned utterly by his enforced beau, Light had neither choice nor say in the matter.

In this way - however exploitative, unfair and downright psychotic it is - Misa cannot easily be cast aside. She might present herself as utterly dependent upon Light, but in reality, it's the other way around. He cannot act in some quite key situations without her Shinigami eyes; or without the usage of her Death Note and the fact of her ownership of the same.

While ostensibly Light calls all the shots, Misa gets precisely what she requires at any given time.

She wants retribution for the killing of her family, she gets it; she wants to meet Kira, she engineers it; she demands to be Light Yagami's girlfriend, she gives him no choice in the matter; she wants him to move in with her, that occurs circa the beginning of the second arc; she decides it's time to get engaged, and Misa doesn't even bother to consult with Light on that one, she tells Kiyomi Takada first instead.

Financially, Misa was a woman of independent means for years before Light Yagami secured the Kira Task Force position to consider himself the same. She was the one with the money, the prestige, the social standing and the sole occupancy of an apartment. She bought her own furniture, clothes, make-up and every other possession with her own funds, including the phone and its network charges that she presents to Light and pays for on his behalf.

Even when Light gets a job and asks Misa to stop working as per social expectation, she could (and does in the Death Note movies) return to her career at any time.

In most fan imaginings, Misa-Misa is Death Note's very energetic answer to that stalwart of anime character archetypes - the Genki Girl. She shouts, screams, rushes about, glomps, squees and generally acts like the average three year old on a profusion of E numbers. Or, indeed, E.

There's plenty of scenes to throw into the mix in support of this designation. Yet look more closely. Shouldn't that be every scene?

In reality, Misa seems to switch Genki Girl on or off, or applies attributes to a precise level, depending upon the situation and who's watching. She's like someone who's read all about Genki Girl and figured that she can pull it off, so goes for it whenever the persona will cover a multitude of personal sins and/or throw people off the scent of her actual intelligence.

Take for example her meeting the Yagami women, whilst visiting Light at home. There Misa is the epitome of maturity; a demure Japanese lady full of politeness and decorum, give or take the length of her skirt. Yet outside, alone with Light on another occasion, she glomps him with all the enthusiastic screaming passion of the Genki Girl personified, now that his mother isn't watching.

Nor does she bamboozle Yotsuba Kira Hidechi with a steady stream of relentless words. Those she chooses are articulate and leading, with adequate gaps in between for him to speak enough to condemn himself.

Meanwhile, there's absolutely nothing of the motormouth, highly animated and over-emotional Genki Girl in Misa when she's detained by L as suspected Second Kira. To be fair, she's also in a full-body straitjacket, so none of that excessively expressive movement is physically able to be on show.

Yet you get the impression it wouldn't be either.

That prolonged scene in a straitjacket, effectively being tortured into submission by L, tells a lot about Misa Amane's true strength of character.

With his arms handcuffed behind his back, Light plays the game in full knowledge of his Kira-hood for a week, then gives that contextual understanding up. Within three days, he's pleading, begging, demanding to be set free, sure that he's not Kira and adamant that he's going to say so repeatedly.

Meanwhile, Misa Amane remains silent and strapped upright to a board, blind-folded, devoid of human contact beyond an electronic voice communicating through a speaker. Not a single word uttered in condemnation nor defense. Nothing whatever to make it worth her torturers' time in detaining her.

When she eventually does feel herself cracking, she finally does speak, but only to ask Rem to kill her. The words enigmatic without context to those listening on. The remainder of her days tortuously attached in that position in a state of near sensory deprivation would have been passed without knowledge of Kira nor her part in the Death Note killings. Yet she still doesn't say much nor beg as Light Yagami did.

Coming to the conclusion that she's been abducted as per her fame, Misa intelligently attempts to humanise herself and make a deal with her abductor.

L eventually has to let her go for the sake of nothing incriminating being divulged to prove her role as Second Kira, nor to use as evidence against Light. How many others could have withstood so much under torture?  Most in that position would be agreeing, admitting or issuing confessions to all and sundry, just to make the torture stop.

Nobody is suggesting for one instant that Death Note's Misa Amane is some unsung genius (though an interesting case might be made for that). However she certainly isn't the dim-witted, unaware character so many make her out to be.

She has drive, intelligence and self-knowledge enough to ensure that she gets what she wants, through a considered application of the attributes and tools in her personal arsenal. She can definitely identify goals, pinpoint way and devise strategies to achieve them, then action those tactics with usually astounding results.

Mostly Misa is fabulous at keeping herself under the radar by ensuring those around her think she's too stupid to understand much that is happening.

However, she proves time and again that she can read situations - and especially people - with a keen accuracy. She can be cute enough to sexually manipulate the men; childish enough to annoy or delight, but never be taken seriously enough for people not to scheme in her vicinity. She sees more than she ever lets on.

She can charm anyone, and uses that to great effect to get people waiting on her hand and foot.

However, when the occasion calls for it, Misa's intelligence shows all the above to be the veneer of an actress. Probably a psychopathic one at that, but certainly not the Genki Girl that she's studiously manufactured her self-image to be.

Do you agree?

This summer, Viz Media celebrates its 30th birthday firmly entrenched as North America's foremost exporter, and promoter, of Japanese manga and anime.

There will be no big party in the streets by all accounts.  Yet fans can look forward to special offers and goodies given out as a thank you for for thirty years of support. 

However, those deals currently announced are only available to indivduals attending anime conventions across the USA.  Kicking off on July 1st-4th 2016, at the Los Angeles Anime Expo, and continuing throughout the summer and autumn season.  More on all that when we know further.

More to the point, Kelts discusses the effect of such global popularity success on the domestic market in Japan. With its shrinking population population and declining consumerism, the business opportunities at home were always limited.  The injection of worldwide capital turned out to be very timely and very welcome for the overall prosperity of that island nation.

Not bad for a notion mooted by a San Francisco hippy, which turned out to be quite a fabulous one at that.  Happy 30th birthday, Viz Media; the celebrations may run worldwide.

By all accounts, Death Note is not a very old anime. Yet since its original run, much has changed.

Misa Amane’s capture was the result of a series of mistakes relating to VHS tapes, but such things are no longer regularly used in our modern world. Flip phones are no longer the dominant device and have instead been replaced with multi-function smartphones.

With that in mind, we’re going to examine how certain key plot elements relating to Misa would have been different were the story to have taken place around today. Would our female protagonist have been captured so quickly? Would modern technology have aided her escape? Perhaps events might have unfolded differently.

As I said before, Misa’s mishaps began with her submission of four tapes to Sakura TV.

Here we would find the first large difference in story had it be cast a little later: VHS pretty much disappeared from use a few years after the show’s original airing.

A more contemporary telling of the story would have her submitting these videos through a different medium. These are some of the most likely candidates:

• A CD/DVD recording
• Files on a flash drive or SD card
• Email (yet unlikely due to file size)
• A cloud sharing service

Two possibilities completely remove the physical evidence discovered in the story: there are no finger prints on sent files, no ink or paper to link the notes and since the files could be sent from anywhere, train tickets would not serve as relevant evidence.

On the other hand, these types of media also leave behind a trail. L might have been able to trace Misa’s IP address from an email, or go to the next level and determine where and when the email address was created in the case of a fake email account.

The same is true of the file sharing. By checking where the files were uploaded from with the cooperation of the host company, L might have been able to deduce either where Misa’s apartment is (if sent from a PC) or her general locale if sent from a mobile device.

This is assuming Misa didn’t use a VPN (Virtual Private Network). She perhaps wouldn’t have hidden her IP address in this way, although if she had it would have inevitably led to some other clever discovery to further the plot (perhaps a method of payment tracking).

As for files, L may have been able to trace the date of creation and possibly even the device used to generate the video. Whether or not this information could help track her down is uncertain, but it’s much less specific than a postage stamp (one of the other pieces of evidence they discovered in her apartment).

When Misa first established contact with Kira, it was because of her abilities (recall she couldn’t see his life span, but could see his name). But at the time of the show’s initial run, social media wasn’t yet very significant. Social media would have presented a very different story because of the sheer number of pictures people take and post online. Granted, these pictures aren’t always labeled or tagged.

This is where Misa’s power comes in. Just looking at the photos with her Shinigami eyes would no doubt have given her the ability to choose from as many victims as she pleased. This huge database would also allow her activities to be considerably more covert than Light’s (although he might have also had a social media page in a modern retelling).

Whether or not Kira would have used social media is a difficult call. Given Light’s age, he probably would have had a page of some kind. It may even have stood in as the means for Misa discovering his identity simply through recommended friends and friends of friends.

Its unlikely social media would have had any significant impact on L. He doesn’t really come across as a character that would have a public profile, though he may have used it as a resource to track down his targets.

Wire-tapping and text messages already existed in the early 2000s, but services like GPS were only just beginning to achieve popularity. Smartphones are very different. They can be used to pinpoint someone’s location within a few meters in some cases. They also communicate with WiFi.

All of these elements are likely to have contributed to an easier capture of Misa. With this information readily available to L and the investigation team, they would have tracked Misa down considerably faster. As a social character, she wouldn’t likely abandon her phone.

Modern cell phones can also be hacked to use their cameras to monitor the owner. Their microphones are also possible to hack with the right apps installed, which could have spelled the premature end for our heroine.

While I can’t imagine the plot points would be changed too much (for entertainment purposes), speculating on the realistic changes leaves me to conclude that Misa would probably have been captured and imprisoned considerably earlier than in the story’s original telling.

Yet there’s another consequence of this: Misa may not have had such a tragic end without the original series of events that followed. Her continued deeper involvement in Kira’s plots is what ultimately drove her to what we can only assume to be her suicide.

So what do you think? Would the changes in technology over the last decade have changed Misa’s situation? If you think so, tell us in the comments.

We invite readers to take The Psychopath Test for Death Note's Misa Amane.  Collectively we might determine whether Second Kira was indeed suffering from psychopathy - and causing victims in their hundreds of thousands to suffer too.

This is the actual twenty-point test devised in 1975 by Bob Hare in consultation with eighty-five of the best psychopathy specialists across the world.  It's the checklist by which you - or anybody - would be subjected in the real world, if a professional had cause to believe that you were a psychopath.

Are you game to complete it on her behalf?

Here is at least one house for gifted children, assumed to be orphans, who are raised in an unfriendly and competitive environment for no other reason other than Quillsh Wammy thought this was an important thing to do. Those children are taught their skills should be directed to a very specific goal: becoming L. L is a detective so the point of collecting those children is to groom them into becoming detectives. More than that, they are trained to be confident in their own reasoning, their own methods of doing what they enjoy.

If the children are taught to find a hobby and to find their own way of achieving the goals of said hobby, can we talk about indoctrination in Wammy’s House? Considering John White’s definition that indoctrination takes place if the intention of the teacher is to make it so that “(t)he child should believe that ‘p’ is true, in a such way that nothing will shake this belief” (White 1972a, 119 and 1973, 179), it could be said the point behind Wammy’s is to make sure the children believe their goal is worth everything.

If they want to solve a case, anything they do to accomplish that (be it breaking the law or putting themselves at risk or indirectly getting people killed or cheating) is worth it. Their conclusion is absolute to the point their actions are justified as if they are justice.

Mello joins the Mafia, K joins a bio-terrorist group, B becomes a serial killer, L himself admits to being a criminal by current laws and is willing to use torture against Misa. Letting them do as they pleased, confident on their own skills and conclusions, seemed to be a pretty chaotic project.

As it is, Watari died before his experiment was complete and we only have bits and pieces of it to try and make sense of his project. But why was it important to Watari to create a group of people with that level of confidence in their own reasoning? Why was it important to let them loose in the world with no guidance or direction?

Article by Lua Cruz

While canon doesn’t linger on Quillsh Wammy on his own, Watari’s existence on itself is implied to occupy a much bigger role than what we actually see.

We are introduced to him as the connection between L and the outside world, and, as the story progresses, we also see Watari is responsible for carrying L’s orders as well as taking care of L himself. We see Watari as the liaison, the butler, the bodyguard and the assistant but we aren’t given a reason to explain this renewed inventor taking on those functions.

We are told, both in the original manga and in the L: The Wammy’s House One-shot, that Quillsh Wammy is a man of wealth.  There is no reason keeping him from paying someone to look after L other than he chose to do it himself. And as we see when L arrives at Wammy’s house, he makes that decision soon after he is introduced to L. That is a choice we are left to explain on our own.

The orphanages weren’t created out of altruism and kindness. When we see one of them, we see a place with barely any furniture and a warden who cares so little for the children he’s responsible for that he doesn’t mind handing over private information he knew could endanger them. It’s not a place for children to grow up happily and safely, neither it is a place for children to be adopted.

After L, the point of, at least, Wammy’s House was to produce a successor and there is no explanation as to why the orphanages were meant to produce something in the first place. In that case, it’s more likely L was what they were looking for and not a random child Watari decided to entertain.

Considering Watari made the decision of establishing several orphanages after World War II, his motivation could’ve been to prevent another war, to find the one mind capable of intervening and putting a stop to such horrors. If L was the answer to the question he was trying to answer with his orphanages, Watari was looking for a kid capable of saying their own methods, their own morals, were just.

In fact, we can go beyond that and consider Watari didn’t change his methods after finding L as much as he was lucky enough to find a child who already did and strongly believed what he wanted the children under his care to do and believe.

Watari forced the children under his care to abide by his own moral inclination despite their own desires but to do so believing in their own deductive skills. They were indoctrinated to believe they, too, could be justice, but only if they were the very best. Personal safety, personal happiness, mental health, physical well-being, etc… were not as important as the good of the majority, but the good of the majority was taught to them as a consequence of their own actions, their own inclinations, their own search for answers.

Not only was Watari morally irresponsible as he allowed L to do as he wished (choosing the cases and methods he pleased under the pretence of representing justice), he was also morally wrong on the orphanage system he created. If he thought the world needed a moral compass that he could provide, he, at least, knew his methods were condemnable enough he should keep them hidden.

It's not in any of my dictionaries nor directories of English surnames, nor the Celtic ones either.  So I take my search for Wammy origins on-line.

The first issue is wading through pages and pages of search engine results relating to Death Note's Wammy and not a lot else. 

Apparently there's a single, solitary individual surnamed Wammy in Tanzania - probably a Death Note fan - and a billion role-players, fan-fiction writers and fan-artists all including the name in their fandom pseudonym.  (I'm just as guilty with my MRSJeevas avatar, which was only ever added for a laugh on a single site right on the eve of my novels taking off...)

Eventually hitting a few 'Wammy Surname Meaning' sites, I draw several large blanks.  The pages are set up, with no historical personages nor current demographical clusters to populate them.

All kind of confirming what instinct said before - Quillsh Wammy has a British feel to it without following through to reality.

Pretty much ready to call it a day, I nontheless duly typed Quillsh Wammy's name into Ancestry. 

He doesn't exist - naturally, as Tsugumi Ohba made him up for Death Note - but Wammy people do with aplomb, figuring highly in the historical record with Christian names that wouldn't seem out of place in Another Note: The LA BB Murder Cases.

Ok, not a Believe Bridesmaid between them, but a Canada Let Wammy, and a Graphics Wammy.  And a Sammystirred Wammy.  All there on board ships or, well mostly, in US High School Yearbooks.  Real, actual US names!  Name-list.com was right to call it above.

But no, skimming down the line reveals a distinct grouping of folk surnamed Wammy - way before Death Note was conceived into literary being - in 18th century Nunkirschen, Prussia and Marne, France.  Then they all disappear again.

Only to resurface two centuries later as a sole fictional character in Winchester, England, and a fair few Americans filling in Yearbooks.

I'm going to assume misspellings in the past and Death Note fans now.  Nevertheless, for your genealogical pleasure, here is that listing.  Off you go fan-fiction writers!

Light Yagami and L have turned up in cartoon and dialogue within the pages of a Social Studies textbook - destined for the classrooms of South Korean 10th Grade schoolchildren.

This is admittedly old news to those living and learning in South Korea, but we admit its only just turned up in our orbit.  The first time the screenshot appeared online was 2009, meaning there's a whole generation of Korean sociologists now used to referencing Kira in their problem-solving.

We'd love to know what it says, if any kind Korean speakers care to translate it for us.  Thanks in advance!

As a police detective lacking in experience, Matsuda becomes the one character involved in the Kira case that is just an ordinary person. He doesn’t have, yet, the strength of will to do good despite himself and, as we see when Matsuda is confronted by the reveal of Kira’s identity, his personal feelings and his moral views are still pretty much the same. If his importance comes from being the less experienced detective, it also comes from Matsuda being our constant reminder of a common sense point of view among more specific moral inclinations.

That is not to say, in any way, that Matsuda isn’t willing to sacrifice himself. The values Matsuda holds true and that motivate him towards acts of selflessness are not motivated by the greater good, so to say. If we look closely, he acts kindly and in a caring manner not as a police officer but as a friend or an empathetic acquaintance. Matsuda’s acts of bravery don’t hold the same meaning as Soichiro’s or Aizawa’s because their reasoning is presented to us as something done because that’s the right thing to do despite their internal conflicts while Matsuda’s actions are shown to be motivated by a desire to do good but an inability to detach himself from his personal desires and conclusions. For example, to show the contrast between Matsuda and the other investigators, we can take Ide as an example.

Ide disagrees with L and walks away from the investigation, he is still unable to walk away from the case itself as that would be turning a blind eye into a situation considered morally wrong. Ide couldn’t bring himself to choose neutrality when he was faced with the consequences of letting Kira run free; walking away from the investigation becomes a shameful act. When Matsuda is faced with doubts regarding Near as L, he isn’t ready to choose his convictions over his work even when he seems convinced Near did terrible things to be able to end the Kira case.

By the end of the manga, Matsuda has acquired some experience and that’s enough to make him doubt Near’s intentions. Nevertheless, Matsuda is, still, only beginning to abandon the path of an ordinary person and truly becoming an investigator. As he chooses to put aside his worries about Near, he also shows us there is a transition to be made from an ordinary person who is meant to be protect by the law and whose concerns can be perceived as personal ones, an actual investigator who can understand doing the right thing requires more than a good heart.

So let us begin by discussing the elephant in the room: the plan is really quite stupid.

A fundamental aspect of any plan is that it can’t be dependent on many independent occurrences happening in the sequence that is desired, for it to be successful. If you watch through the scene with a healthy level of scrutiny and cynicism then you notice that with a few significant changes in the behaviour of various actors within the plot, the outcome would have been very different.

This can seem a little counter-intuitive at first because it goes against our normal day to day experiences with motion and mechanics. When we want to go forward we just ’go forward’ and usually lean ourselves forward slightly, but we are actually pushing back against the ground to launch ourselves forward. We don’t really consider this about our movements, because we do it all so instinctively.

When people are thrown in zero gravity environment, like vomit comet flights, they usually flail around and try to swim through the air. This is exceptionally inefficient because you can’t swim in air. (Start at 2:20 in the video below.)

So to be entirely factual, you can kind of swim through air, but you need to going quick enough (or in windy enough conditions) that you can divert the air around you to guide yourself.

However, the few feet fallen between balconies is not enough time to even get close to the right speed. So unless a strong gust blew him suddenly back into the building, he has got to fall almost straight down. Which is a lot harder than it seems even with all the caveats of caution that we have looked at above.

Firstly, the last point of anchorage was the balcony ledge, upon which he made himself fall off of to the right. As a result his momentum is heading away from the building already. From where he is it is possible for him to fall vertically, but it is just very unlikely. His stance before ’slipping’ is nearly completely upright, so his centre of gravity is very high. That point is also very far from the pivot point, so is able to move a great distance horizontal with only a slight lean over the edge, and once set in motion they’ll be very little to correct it.

This is a fundamental issue when trying to on to an that is not below you, but instead below the object you are hanging off of. If you watch some trying to swing to a balcony from the one above you’ll notice that is actually very awkward to do.

The basic principles of mechanics make the very first part quite difficult, but we won’t write it off as impossible, because it is technically possible, just bloody awkward.

Some of you may be shouting about ’crumple zones’ or *impulses*. Firstly, well done for listening during your science lessons. Secondly, you’re still wrong. Sorry.

Impulse is the change of momentum of an object, and cannot be changed for a given interaction. Momentum is simply to the mass of an object, multiplied by its velocity. So for a set object at a set velocity, coming to a rest, the momentum change is always going to be the same, so the impulse will be constant. But the force acting on that object is related to the time taken for the momentum change to happen. Impulse is usually denoted by a J (don’t ask why) and is defined as

But for more simple cases we can simplify it to:

The first method is more thorough and can deal with more complex and interesting cases, but the second method is more applicable to every day examples. So working with the second equation let’s posit some numbers so we can illustrate our point. Let’s say you weigh 100kg and you’re travelling at 20ms-1 your momentum will be 2000Ns. If you, upon hitting the mattress, are going from that speed to rest your momentum change, or impulse, will be 2000Ns (as when you are not moving your velocity is zero so your momentum is also zero). The force you, the object feel, can now be found from the above equation for impulse, but we need to know the time over which it takes for you to stop. In a world without mattresses the time taken to stop is extremely short. If we assume that it takes 0.1 seconds to stop, then we have

This number is pretty high, and is like being rocked by a heavyweight boxers punch over your entire body. It’s not guaranteed to kill you, but it is like falling from a five story building, so unlikely to go well. But if we to simply extend the time it to stop by a factor of 5 (so it now takes half a second to stop) the force would drastically reduce to 4000N. Which would feel more equivalent to falling off a 2 foot high table (or around 70cm). An uncomfortable experience, and you can still break bones or damage your dignity, but significantly less likely to kill you.

But the ability of a mattress to replicate this increase of time to stop is highly suspicious, especially given the fall to that point. We have to take a few liberties because working out what exactly is going on in terms of precise numbers is not easy, but if we go for assumptions that make the events more likely, it looks like the fall is about two floors. This means that by the time he hits the mattress he is travelling at about 11ms-1. If we give him a weight of about 60kg then the force he experiences upon stopping at the mattress is a minimum of 3300N (but more likely nearing toward 6000N). This isn’t too bad as we showed earlier it was like falling off a table, but that was based on falling off a table onto a relatively flat floor. Here, we’re not.

We’re falling backwards onto a sharp edge. That force instead of being spread across the whole body is being focused directly across his back. Once again working on rough estimations, if we say the area of impact is about 0.006m2 (60cm is the width of his back, and the thickness of the ledge at impact is about a centimetre because his coming down on it at an angle) than the force per square metre climbs drastically 550,000Nm-2. That’s the kind of force
that snaps bones and spinal columns pretty swiftly.

What we are reliant on for this part to work is that the super thick mattress used isn’t like most mattresses, but instead is incredibly springy and cushioning, and able to absorb the entirety of the force, without dislodging or sliding, and without bending backwards over the edge (throwing our unlucky chap to the fate he seems destined for anyway).

I suppose it is possible, and I have just been experiencing awful mattresses, but it is demanding a lot from us to expect mattresses to behave like they do in TV, rather than how they do in real life.

So we are now down to the final part of the ruse, the fake throw and body. I’m including these two acts together because the problems with both are linked together. The initial part is how long it will take for someone falling to hit the ground. Once again, we are going off assumptions, but they will illustrate the problem even if we are off by a floor or two.

From my guesstimates it looks like the mattress is two floors below the party, and the ground is 5 floors below the mattress. With a height of seven floors we get an approximate height of the fall of about 21m (a storey is about 3m), and due to a series of equations called the suvat equations we can work out how long it would take to fall that distance.

For reasons that are best left unexplained, s is the distance, u is the initial velocity, a is the acceleration, and t is the time. In our case we know most of these values already. As we have said before s is about 21m, u is zero because he initially starts at rest (yes, that weird daredevil feat is classified as rest in this case, physics is odd), and a is just the gravitational acceleration due to the earth, which is 9.81ms-2. So we can rearrange this all to find an equation for t

But that isn’t what happens here, instead the bag is thrown when he hits the mattress. If we assume the best case scenario, that the bag is thrown the moment he hits the mattress, then we instead have two equations that must be added together (one for the 6m fall, and another for the 15m fall). This gives a time to fall of a little over 2.8s. You may say that 0.8 of a second is too small for us to notice, but you would be surprisingly wrong (and it should be noted that the reality of the scene was the bag was thrown after he hit the mattress which would just increase the number).

Humans have a surprisingly good instinct for how things behave in Newtonian physics. It is the physics of every day motion.

When your friend is running across a field and you hurl a ball towards them you have instinctively solve a bunch of equations simultaneously to calculate where your friend will be, the trajectory of the ball, how long the ball will travel for, so where to aim for the intersection of friend and ball. Your brain is amazingly good at instinctively understanding how bodies behave at speeds and masses familiar to us, so when something happens within these ranges that feels wrong we notice very quickly. When the wannabe acrobat tumbled off the edge the people would have instinctively expected him to hit the ground at a certain time.

There would obviously be a margin of error, but the actual noise would come after they had begun to feel that disaster had been avoided. They wouldn’t know it immediately, but something about it would bother them, and would niggle at them. This could be avoided if the next part, which is too have some human juice surrounding the body.

I don’t recommend looking up pictures of people who committed suicide by jumping off of great heights, but the person rarely looks all that pleasant afterwards. There are cases (the picture known as ’The Most Beautiful Suicide’ is a notable example) where the person looks relatively normal, but these are usually from when the impact was cushioned in a way that wasn’t enough to prevent death but was enough to stop the body being damaged.

There is usually some blood, some contortions of the limbs (that have broken or bent in inhuman ways), and in the most unpleasant of cases the head has cracked violently. These are pretty nasty aspects, but not beyond what you would expect the supposed mastermind of this act to know, and given the stakes these men have in deaths, they would probably know of this too.

They probably wouldn’t immediately call the whole act bullshit, but just like the extended fall time, it would continue to bother them and haunt them for reasons they can’t quite understand. They would probably at first assume it is because it was such an odd and ’tragic’ act, but those little errors, those disjointed continuities, they would begin to become more and more obvious to them.

Unless these men are truly the idiots that L assumes them to be (which I doubt because their supposed positions of seniority), someone would become suspicious of something, and seeing as they seemingly wanted him dead (once again, the narrative context is a little lost on me) I doubt that once they were rumblings that it could have been staged, it would be harder to put it back in Pandora’s box again.

So after looking through the mechanics of the act it becomes obvious that the whole thing is possible, but decreasingly plausible.

They are so many little parts of it that either require the world to be more favourable than it usually is, and for those in the room to not notice any inconsistencies with the normal reality of such a large fall.

But the problem with the whole thing is that it fundamentally requires every single person in the room to act exactly as L predicts them to.

All it takes is for one person to run to the edge of the balcony, one person to attempt to physically remove him from his foolish feats, or one person to look down a little too soon and see a mattress poking out.

A good plan does not require that everything go an exact way for it to work, it just requires a few key events to ensure the course of fate runs the way you desire. The fundamental reason this plan would not work in the real world is because people like L think they can control everything but forget that humans have an amazing ability to go off script.

Moreover, Chapman contextualises Kira within the wider auspices of justice.  Making me happy, he also alights upon issues of human rights, which Light Yagami certainly never goes near.

Though he never elaborates upon the point, the columnist does demonstrate quite clearly how easily society will accept the wicked and insane, if the justification is presented gradually and enticingly enough.  In this regard using Kira apologists amongst the Death Note fandom as an example, rather than, say, Donald Trump's supporters.  Seen from a long view, their pro-Kira arguments are denigrated as 'commonly insane'.  Can't argue there!

His ultimate dismissal of Light Yagami as God - or Kira as a force of justice and good - pretty much serves as the Japanese populace turning its collective back upon such grandiose pretensions of divinity.   Or as Chapman puts it:

And though Chapman doesn't go so far as to say it, doesn't that make Matsuda our representative in the Death Note universe too?  The Everyman serves as spokesperson for the readership, as we get seduced by the rhetoric of Light Yagami and symbolizes our own slap in the face by reality, as Kira's descent into insanity becomes way too obvious to support.

Then we too, like Matsuda, get to retrace our own allegiances back through each worsening compromise to that first loosening of all common sense and good morals.

Instead, Chapman sees in Matsuda a proxy for Tsugumi Ohba's own secret views on the matter, which itself makes fascinating reading and compelling food for thought.   It's definitely worth the time to check it out.

But it's OK.  No-one will ever know.  Just a bit of fiction wrapped around with fancy, that anyway is never going to happen.

So we mentally kill a politician or two, whomever is being an idiot on the news that day, or whose policies have actually ruined our world. An opening gambit in our meandering musing bid to save humanity; improve our lot - not us per say - the little people without much of a voice, trampled historically from ancestor to ancestor and then well into our own lifetimes. Or those suffering properly in far-flung war-torn places; repressed, helpless, bereft of hope and security; certainty only in that looming loss of life and liberty.

Because we personally know plenty of them.

Nevertheless, it sounds suitably heroic. And we can be heroes, David Bowie said we can.

Except then we cerebrally kill the rude commuter just now pushing past us in the queue, and the jobs-worth conductor on the train, and the incomparably selfish git who sent that smug email waiting for us when we get in.

Suddenly the self-congratulatory glow of knowing ourselves to be superheroes - secretly - has slipped a little, and its going to take a lot more justification to accept the slip of their wanton murder, than it does for that of a talking head politician abusing your mandate to act upon domestic and world stages. 

How far did you get in your mental musings, before you found yourself skirting a little too close to becoming Kira?  Scary, isn't it?  When there but for the Grace of no shinigami, bored and visiting to enable us, we might all be Kira next.

Incidentally, I do see a rotten world and take names, write them down to make it better. Because sometimes urgent action needs to be taken.  I've been doing it for years, and you can too.  Better to light a candle in the world than curse the darkness.  Better Light, than Kira.

Though trust me, there are times when I wish that the letters I penned where written on pages from a shinigami notebook.  No better than Light in the end; just a human being, that's all, in want of peace and a world as beautiful as it can be.  Which is what causes that endless craving for action when things go wrong - somebody to just do something - and what makes Death Note such an attractive and intriguing concept.

What do you reckon?  All secretly seething with the inherent instinct of a Kira?  Or was Light Yagami somehow special, insane or burdened with a flawed sort of personality?  Over to you.