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What does Misa-Misa's Name Mean? How does the Kanji for Misa Amane REALLY translate into English?  (Guest Post by Amaryllis)

8/6/2016

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The kanji for Misa Amane should be quite straight-forward. But its not.

Both are reasonably common names in Japan.  Enough that none would blink at encountering  an individual bearing the surname Amane, though it's not one of the topmost family names.  More a marginal, decently sized minority.

Amane is actually more often found as a first name, applicable for males and females alike.

They certainly wouldn't fain surprise at bumping into a Japanese lady or girl named Misa.  There's a lot of them about!

All adding up to it being not beyond the realms of possibility for there to be real life females called Misa Amane dotted about Japan.

They must have loved it when Death Note came out! Living for every update, with ten years worth of practiced responses under their belt - tried and tested in readiness to meet all those quips about shinigami eyes, ditzy dorks and Genki Girls, Light Yagami, Death Notes and referring to oneself in the third person.

Are you one?  Or do you know Misa Amane in real life? 

Do please come and share with us your anecdotes!  We're dying to know.

(As you can probably already tell, just by looking at the dates above our heads!  Sorry.  I'll see myself out.)
I strove hard to create names that seemed real, but could not exist in the real world. ~ Tsugumi Ohba, How to Read, p59

If the family name Amane and given names Misa AND Amane are fairly unremarkable - taken in isolation, beyond the tedium and taint of Death Note mass killing psychos - then what's so complicated about interpreting the meaning of the kanji for Misa Amane?


Everything.  Misa Amane's kanji is not like all the rest.

Death Note Misa Amane kanji
Most frequently used kanji for Misa in Japan:
(Translation: Beautiful Assistant)

Other variants in Misa kanji, with their meanings below:
美砂
Beautiful Sand
美佐
Rare Beauty/Beauty like Gold Dust
美沙
Golden Light/Glittering Sand/Silver Glow/Sparkling Beach/Star Light
光沙
(Lit: No Gauze) Virginal/Honesty/
Guileless/Without Strings

未紗
Chastity
操
Kanji for Death Note's Misa:
(Translation: Looks like 'wet sand' to me,  author's explanation notwithstanding)
海砂

Meaning Behind Misa Amane's Given Name According to Tsugumi Ohba

Misa Amane Death Note cover
Katakana Misa-Misa Japanese spelling of her name in Death Note
Word of God moment now, as the true translation of Death Note Misa's first name isn't mentioned in the manga, anime, movies nor anywhere else. 

It's in the manual, of course.

Please open your books to page 60, for in the Beginning the Death Note Creator made the Shinigami Realm and human world, and named all the characters within. Then gave them kanji to spell and shape this new reality.
The Origin of Misa's Name
It was kind of random but I think it was from "kuromisa" [Black Mass].  It must have been based on something.
~ Tsugumi Ohba, How to Think, Death Note 13: How to Read, p60

It's actually most blatantly seen in the spelling of Misa's self-referential nickname.  The Second Kira always name-checks herself in the third person as Misa-Misa.

As it's rendered in katakana, there's no wriggle room for dissent here.  It says Misa Misa and that's that.  However, as Ohba already pointed out, 'misa' is the Japanese word for 'mass' in the Catholic liturgy meaning.

Which itself, in Catholicism's native Latin, is called 'missa solemnis' (High Mass), 'missa lecta' (Low Mass) or 'missa cantata' (Sung Mass, minus an ordained minister). 

Opening up an interesting notion that Misa is really calling herself 'Mass Mass', or 'the blessing and the benediction'.  In which the objectifying lack of a pronoun is quite correct.
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.)

Translation of the Amane Kanji for Death Note's Misa Misa

However, it's not just her given name that's attached to strange kanji and multi-faceted katakana.  

Misa's family name is equally like no kanji that's ever been associated with Amane prior to Death Note.  Nor can it be translated the same.

The usual kanji for Amane as a surname can be multiple and quite diverse, but within a certain theme of numinous incantations and the aural divine, plus pathetic fallacy.  The two most common Amane kanji are:
天音 meaning Heavenly Sound
雨音 meaning The Sound of Rain
For Misa Amane's family name the kanji is thus, and quite unlike the others:
弥
This rare usage of Amane kanji means something like 'increasingly' or 'more and more'.  Though where Tsugumi Ohba's mind was there, who can tell?   He never explained it, but left it to us.
Picture

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Subtlety Beneath the Stereotype: Is There More to Misa Amane Than Meets the Eye?

4/6/2016

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Misa Amane/Death Note.
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.

Death Note's Misa Achieves Dividends When She Acts

Misa Amane with evidence to prove Higuichi is Kira

Misa Amane with evidence to prove Higuichi is Kira
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.

How Clever Misa Amane Outwits Both L and Light in the Hunt for Kira

Misa Amane tracking down Light Yagami

Misa Amane tracking down Light Yagami
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.

Overly Attached Girlfriend Misa Amane: Is She Really So Dependent on Light?

Stereotyped throughout the Death Note fandom as the overly dependent girlfriend from Hell, that description seems only partially correct under analysis.

Misa certainly goes after and gets what she wants in the romantic stakes. Moreover, from the onset, she'll use every manipulative trick in the book to keep her man and ensure his romantic availability is retained for herself alone.

Who can forget the chilling statement that she will kill any other woman that Light dates? Basically laying it on the line at their first meeting that he gets her or nobody. Those are her terms.
Misa will kill Light's girlfriends
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.

Misa Amane as the Archetypal Anime Genki Girl

Misa glomping Light Yagami
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.

Hidden Reserves of Strength in Misa-Misa

Misa Anime in a straitjacket
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.

Misa Amane: Worldly Wise and Self-Possessed of All her Assets and Skills

Misa Amane Death Note drama
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?

Published as Part of

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Viz Media Turns 30 (Promises Goodies to Thank Fans) - Japanamerica Pop Culture Scholar Roland Kelts Contemplates the Impact of Three Decades of Viz

3/6/2016

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Happy 30th Birthday Viz Media
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.

What Did Viz Media Ever Do for Us Anyway?

The obvious response is that Viz Media brought us Death Note.  Game over and cause to party right there.

However, if we can broaden our horizons for just three seconds, an even greater boon may be discerned. If you're reading from a Western nation then you have a lot to thank the company for in how it's spent those decades. Viz Media is probably the reason that you're here, or have even heard of Death Note. 

Even if only indirectly, with Viz acting as the trend-setter company that inspired others elsewhere to follow its lead, bringing Japanese pop culture into your local stores.

It barely seems possible that a time existed when the words 'manga' and 'anime' weren't mainstream in the West.  That outside Japan and its immediate neighbouring states, only Eastern ex-pats, Japanese Cultural Studies students, and a scattering of literary sci-fi geeks in any nation could have told you with any certainty what such alien terms described.  Or even hazarded a decent guess.

Yet in 1986, when Seiji Horibuchi - a Japanese ex-pat from Shikoku, then living in San Francisco - mooted to friends the notion that he could interest Americans in manga, anime and other cultural mainstays from his homeland, most people laughed.  They didn't think readers in the US would go for that at all.

Though obviously the majority first had to ask him what manga and anime were, before getting on with the general amusement and cynicism. 

Three decades later, we can say with great certainty that he wiped the smile off their faces.  Seiji's efforts through Viz Media - the company he founded to make good his idea and his dream - not only made him extremely rich, it secured a place for manga, anime and all else attached in the American heart and throughout the Western world.
Seiji Horibuchi Founder of Viz Media

Viz Media founder Seiji Horibuchi

Roland Kelts Puts Viz Media's Achievements in Context

Japanamerica by Roland Kelts cover

Buy Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture
has Invaded by US
by Roland Kelts on Amazon US
Just in case you haven't already grasped the enormity of Viz Media's impact in the West, Roland Kelts is on hand to spell it out.

As an academic specialising in Japanese Cultural Studies, Kelts is an author; essayist; lecturer at Keio University, Tokyo (and the occasional TED Lecture too); journalist with regular articles and columns in such illustrious publications as Time Magazine, The New York Times, Newsweek Japan and The Guardian; and steering committee member of the Tokyo Think Tank Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation.

He also wrote the acclaimed JapanAmerica (see left), all about how Japanese manga, anime and other pop culture became so big in the USA.

In May 2016, his monthly editorial for The Japan Times was devoted to Viz Media's thirty years as the main instigator of that.

Entitled Viz's 30 Years Pack a Punch in the US (May 14th 2016), Kelts outlines how Seiji Horibuchi pulled it off - from unlikely beginnings in the 1980s through to the legacy left behind by the time he parted company with Viz Media to explore pastures new.

Comparing notes with modern day Chief Marketing Officer Brad Woods, Kelts explores how Viz Media played a key role in the changing face of manga interest and sales throughout the West; touches upon the ever-growing mainstream awareness of Japanese pop culture, and projects how that success may continue into the future.

He's rather excited about how titles like Death Note are discussed as commonplace, particularly within the glittering circles of Hollywood studios executives, telling us that, 'in all the years I’ve watched manga and anime become mainstays in American homes, I’ve never seen a moment quite like this.'
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.
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Misa Amane: A Modern Take (Guest Post by Cassie Phillips)

2/6/2016

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Misa Amane and friend Death Note anime

Death Note's Misa Amane and friend create Second Kira's VHS tapes
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.

Storage Media

Second Kira tapes held by L in Death Note
L exhibits Misa's VHS tape
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).

Social Media: A Database of Targets

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).
Misa Amane's shinigami eyes

Misa uses her Shinigami eyes to identify victims...
Misa Amane sees through Shinigami eyes in Death Note movie

... and Kira too.
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.

Smartphone Technology

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.

Misa's Ultimate Fate?

Light and Misa with her phone
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.

Bio: Cassie Phillips is a writer and blogger who likes to focus on entertainment topics (especially anime) and technology. She loves new tech and finds it very interesting to talk about these sorts of questions.

Posted as Part of

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Reader Survey: Death Note's Misa Amane Takes The Psychopath Test

27/5/2016

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Psycho Misa Amane Death Note manga
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?

Misa-Misa's Psychopath Test

For each point, you must provide a score: 0 = no match in this instance; 1 = partial match for Misa-Misa; 2 = perfectly describes Misa Amane

1 Glib and Superficial Charm Card carrying psychopaths tend to be charming, beguiling and blessed with a definite gift of the gab. They aren't at all shy nor self-conscious; the rules in social etiquette regarding what may be spoken, where and to whom, simply do not apply to these people. They have transceded social norms in conversation and other forms of speech. Psychopaths could charm the birds from the trees, but that easy engagement only goes skin-deep. They know how to play you, so they do.
2 Grandiose Self-Worth You may think they're wonderful, but that's nothing compared to their view of themselves. Psychopaths simply believe themselves superior in every way; head and shoulders above any other human being, and the only one who matters. Their arrogance dismisses the needs, concerns and ideals of others at a flick. Such things can't factor, if they run contrary to the divine wishes of the psychopath's own self.
3 Need for Stimulation or
Proneness to Boredom
A bored psychopath is a dangerous entity indeed; tedium is a state to be avoided at all costs for this seeming invulnerable character (at least as regard their own self-perception). Thril-seeking, novelty, risk-taking, stimulation of all natures and forms are part and parcel of the psychopath's day. They rarely undertake or else finish to completion any task deemed tedious. Their need for excitement and/or entertainment will trample over the needs of all else present.
4 Pathological Lying It's not so much that the psychopath has to lie, but that they see no reason not to, when it achieves an end faster than the truth. This includes all elements of craftiness, cunningness, clever tricks, misinformation, right the way through to actual manipulation.
5 Conning and Manipulativeness Linked to point four, but much more focused upon actions than verbal sleight of hand. Cheating or defraud others; acting deceitful, exploitative, callous through to ruthless; using every trick in the book to have their way, control the scene or otherwise indulge in personal gain. The psychopath doesn't factor in the feelings nor suffering of anyone else wandering into their vicinity and falling prey to their wiles.
6 Lack of Remorse or Guilt Dispassionate regard towards victims (and indeed all other people not otherwise at the focus of their attention) bordering upon utter disdain. These people don't matter, so why should our psychopath feel empathy, mercy or any concern for their pain and suffering?
7 Shallow Affect Though openly exhuberent, these emotions only go skin-deep. Under the surface, there's a general dirth of feelings. Where such exist, they're shallow and limited in scope. Those feelings extended towards others tend to be cold.
8 Callousness and
Lack of Empathy
Victims aside, there is a marked lack of emotional engagement or empathetic feeling towards any other person in general. The psychopath is not only cold, superior and arrogant, but can be downright tactless too.
9 Parasitic Lifestyle Responsibilities are something which happens to other people. The psychopath is adept in persuading others to complete their tasks for them, not to mention supporting them emotionally, financially and in whatever scheme they've lately devised to assuage their boredom. The psychopath likes EVERYONE'S lives to revolve around them.
10 Poor Behavioural Controls Psychopaths cannot control their outbursts in regard to irritability, impatience, boredom, annoyance, or simply general unhappiness in the present situation. This can take the form of endless whining; hasty actions; blame/condemnation of anyone present; demands; aggression; verbal abuse; emotional abuse; temper tantrums and/or threats.
11 Promiscuous Sexual Behavior A succession of one-night stands or short, superficially felt relationships is the hallmark of the psychopath's love-life. If married, they engage in affairs willy-nilly with no remorse attached, nor the understanding of why they should experience guilt. There may also be a history of coercion in sexual acivity or else indulging in kiss and tell stories to a grandiose scale.
12 Early Behavioural Problems Prior to the age of thirteen, our psychopath will already have exhibited several unsociable, cruel or otherwise criminal behavioural trends. These include, but are not limited to: cruelty to animals; bullying; vandalism; stealing; arson; alcohol/drug/glue abuse; running away from home; truancy from school etc.
13 Lack of Realistic,
Long-Term Goals
The psychopath may promise, brag and plan, but few of their apparent heartfelt goals will come to fruition. Half the time, they're only trying to impress their audience in the present with no intention of following those dreams through into reality. Where they do attempt to realise them, persistent failure awaits, as psychopathy doesn't allow for the stamina through routine and boring tasks needful to see most plans through to the end.
14 Impulsivity Psychopath see; psychopath do... or want, or must follow, or has to have a go. You know the routine. There is little in the way of planning, evaluation, reflection or anything else, when faced with the temptation of novelty, fun or something shiny-pretty. Psychopaths are known for their foolhardy, ill-considered, risk-taking and above all spontaneous endeavours.
15 Irresponsibility Debt collectors and other inconsequential people may hammer on the door all they like, psychopaths see no gain in honouring commitments like loan repayments or securing bills with direct debits and the like. Setting those up were well below the priority mark; somewhere in the 'never to be done unless done for me' section of worldly obligations. They will equally skip out of deals; renign on contracts; hand in sub-standard work; and personal promises were forgotten a second after makng them. Psychopaths also have terrible time-keeping, being habitually late or simply absent, even if their livelihoods or other key concerns reply upon it.
16 Failure to Accept Responsibility
for Own Actions
It's anybody's fault but their own! Psychopaths take blame culture to a whole new level - relentless on the point that all fault lies with somebody else, probably the person accusing or implying fault with the psychopath. Truth becomes selectively rendered, or value judgements applied haphazardly to elements within each scenario, and if all else fails, the psychopath will reimagine truth entirely being so aggressively emphatic on the veracity of this make-believe that others will start doubting the evidence of their own recollection.
17 Many Short-Term Marital Relationships The commitment inherent in long-term relationships means nothing to the psychopath. It's not so much that such conventions are ignored, as not seen as applicable to them in the first place.
18 Juvenile Delinquency Between the ages of 13-18, the childhood behavioural difficulties swing into whole new dimensions. Those prone to animal cruelty now don't stop at killing those poor creatures; bullies take their aggression into avenues that even the most lazy school administrations can't ignore; small scale arsonists are now burning down buildings etc. All unsociable actions of the psychopath are marked by callous, ruthless, exploitative, antagonistic regard.
19 Revocation of Conditional Release Softening factors in judicial punishments start to fall by the wayside, as violations like careless behaviour, failing to appear etc puts the psychopath in contempt. Probation will turn into incarceration; sentences will extend etc.
20 Criminal Versatility The psychopath takes great pride in not being pigeon-holed as any specific type of criminal. The greater the diversity, audacity, scope and everything else that can put them in a class of their own in any given criminal underworld, is what the psychopath pursues with glee. They will turn their hand to anything because, well, the law doesn't actually apply to them, does it? Or they're justified in this instance - new world orders to create and all that.
TOTAL
DIAGNOSIS Misa Amane
Now we just have to compare what every other Death Note fan concluded whilst taking the Psychopath Test for Misa Amane.

Enter your diagnosis here, then click 'see results' to check out the overall opinion of Death Note fan psychologists thus far:

polls

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Is Misa the Bigger Villain? Excerpt from an Essay by Serria

23/5/2016

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Reproduced with permission from an essay originally, and fully, published at DEATH NOTES: an online source for Death Note Analysis and Discussion
(links at the end)

by Serria

I've been thinking about the character Misa Amane a lot recently.

When we first met her in Death Note, and for awhile after that I admit I thought she was a cute girl. Flawed, yes, and irritatingly obsessed with Light, but she was certainly charming.

However, at a certain point in the manga I just felt like she crossed the line of what makes a person the least bit decent, and I rather despised her. When I overcame personal emotions about it (still in the process, at least), I really tried to analyze her character.

And I've come up with a resolution:  Misa Amane is a bigger villain than Light, and more ethically corrupt than Light, L, Near and Mello.

Misa Amane Death Note
I should say now that I do not think that Misa is weak-willed or spineless. I've seen her portrayed that way all the time in fanfiction but I think she's quite the contrary. She's extremely assertive (almost frighteningly so!) and I would even go so far as to say that she's selfish. She's extremely "Misa wants, Misa gets" in how she acts - and she DOES end up getting a lot of what she wants. She pressures Light into a relationship by threatening to kill his other girls and of course uses Rem's love for her as a pawn too.

The most important thing to note, and we've all noticed it - Misa freely gives up her individuality for Light's sake. Everything she does, she does for him. It is true that Misa believes that she owes something to Kira for killing her parents' murderer. But she takes this above and beyond. Once she sees him she is "in love", and therefore I'm inclined to assume that she's acting out of lust as much as admiration. She idealizes him and throws away everything else. Therefore she's putting her own dignity and humanity aside in favor of a boy. She even said that she was okay with being a pawn if she was doing it for him.

And on that note, like the 4 Geniuses, she is manipulative to boot. She's not as smart as they are, but she's not completely stupid either. First off, she clearly takes advantage of Rem. Rem is as innocent as a Shinigami could be in unconditionally loving the girl. But she is constantly spurned by Misa. At the very start of Misa's introduction, Rem tells Misa how a Shinigami dies, after making her promise not to tell. In Misa's first meeting with Light, she reveals the secret. Misa uses Rem even when her memory is wiped, to kill a man (an innocent man, if I remember right) in order to convince Higuchi that she's Kira. Rem ends up dying for Misa, and killing Watari and L along with herself. Granted there is a time gap between this scene and then part 2, but it bothered me always that we never saw her mourning Rem at all.

She completely disregards her friends. At the very start, on her first meeting with Light, she offers to kill her friend who helped her make the Kira tapes. And I think she would have done it without a second glance. Later on, it royally pissed me off when she was perfectly alright with killing L, too. She didn't even think about what it meant, it was simply that she wanted to remember his name for Light.

I would also like to mention that it's possible that Misa is responsible for more deaths than Light. I'm not certain about this, but I believe that Misa was the one with ownership of a Death Note and killing people from the time L died to Light's death...

To read more, please visit DEATH NOTES and Serria's original posting of his Light Yagami essay: Is Misa the Bigger Villain?

DEATH NOTES is an invaluable resource for those who like a bit of academia in their reading of the Death Note manga.  Largely inactive now,  its archives nevertheless contain a rich bounty of timeless essays written during the period when Death Note was first coming to the attention of international audiences and readers.  The site's essayists emanate from varying disciplines within the academe, with less formal - sometimes downright flippant - pieces interspersed for flavour.

The excerpt above was republished here with permission from DEATH NOTES' editor Jennifer Fu.

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Watari's Indoctrination of Wammy Kids in Death Note (Analysis by Lua Cruz)

4/5/2016

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There is little to no question about the unethical basis of the system behind Wammy’s House.


We are shown a place with barely any adult supervision in which the children are allowed to be aggressive or behave however they please, with a warden who seems to care very little for the children under his care to the point of simply letting one of them walk out and expecting another to do the same.

Not only that but the house itself seems to have almost no furniture.

In the story, it may not seem so odd since, by the time we are introduced to Wammy’s House, we are aware it isn’t just a common orphanage housing children. But that only makes the existence of such place even more disturbing.
Wammy's House Roger with Mello and Near
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.
L - Justice will prevail - Death Note
It’s important to point out that they are not acting for the sake of justice or in the name of justice. They act as if them themselves are the embodiment of justice.

In this sense, they can do no wrong because their actions are just, they are right because they are their actions.

For example, to sacrifice the Mafia in order to get a chance to capture Kira was a selfish action; Mello wasn’t acting in the name of justice. And it was because it was a selfish decision considering his own goals that he acts as if he is justice. Those lives are worth less than capturing this criminal.

This is an educational system Watari established for a reason canon doesn’t explore. Why would he want to indoctrinate children to believe their own conclusions and decisions, even when perceived as selfish ones, were right not only to themselves but to the world?

None of the Wammy’s kids wonder if Kira could possibly be right as we see Matsuda doing. They know he is a criminal; they know they have to stop him.

If we consider they are meant to solve crimes, it could be Watari actually had an altruistic goal in mind such as world peace. But there is no interference from him in the direction those children take, and, in fact, quite a few ex-Wammy’s kids are willing to become criminals in order to achieve a goal or prove a point.
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

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What Were the Stakes for Watari in Death Note? (Analysis by Lua Cruz)

3/5/2016

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Death Note's Watari with L Code

Quillsh Wammy as L's aide Watari in Death Note
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.
L hoarding toys in L: The Wammy House Death Note one-shot

L hoarding toys in L: The Wammy House Death Note one-shot
It could’ve been boredom. Watari is shown to be an old man; it’s possible he has seen what he wanted to see and has done what he wanted to do. He’s an inventor, a creative mind, and he could be following this unpredictable child to see what he would do. Surely, boredom could be a motivation.

But what does it say for his morality that he allowed a young child to go unpunished for beating up his house-mates and hoarding toys meant to be shared?

More than that, he actually rewarded L’s behavior, showing him attention and giving him whatever he asked for even when that meant taking a monetary risk. 

Although curiosity born out of boredom could be the reason Watari singles out L, it doesn’t explain the reasoning that created the circumstances that allowed him to find a child like L.
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.
The idea behind his orphanages was grooming children who met a certain standard to become the moral compass of the world, and, by choosing this particular child to become the standard the other children should follow, Watari himself chose this child as the ideal one.

To make a choice like that, Quillsh Wammy had to be particularly confident on his own morality, his own sense of justice and his own intelligence. He had to be sure he was right, that was he was doing and the possible grief he would cause was worth it.

If Watari set out to find a child who could become Justice in the world, his resolve was not to raise children nor was it to provide them a loving home.

He established a system that allowed him to find someone he considered capable of being justice and provided this person with all resources required. He modified the system in place just enough to create another person based on the standard is first choice produced.

That being the case, we can say Watari considered the common good to be indubitably more important than personal well-being.
Death Note Near hearing L talk about justice and his cases

Death Note Near hearing L talk about justice and his cases
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.
Article by Lua Cruz

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Origin of the Name Quillsh Wammy - Nationality and Meaning Behind the Surname Wammy

16/4/2016

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Death Note's Wammy in the frame.
As a historian and genealogist, I've searched for many weird and wonderful names in the past. You should see what some of the Victorians were naming their offspring, not to mention what English monoglot census clerks wrote in lieu of actually recording the names given to them by my Welsh antecedents.

But Quillsh Wammy?

It's the first time that a Month of character focus on Death Note News has fastened upon an individual with a British sounding moniker.  This should be game on.

I have the tools to do it and decades worth of skills to throw into the mix. 

Nevertheless,  I've got to admit, it seems like a quest doomed to failure.

Quillsh Wammy might sound British, particularly when wrapped around such a formal, stiff-upper-lipped gentleman, tuxedo clad and with a known home in Winchester.   However sounds British is the optimum phrase here.

I doubt I've ever met a Wammy in my life, and certainly not encountered a Quillsh.   Hey-ho, let's give it a go.

Hunt for the Origin of the Wammy Surname

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.

Could Wammy Indonesian or from the Nederlands?

Wammy surname demographics
Then pay-dirt - BAM!   A website claims to have a plethora of Wammy families dotted all over the world!

Until you dig in to see and notice that actually it's just one or two individuals hailing from quite disparate regions of the world.  In short, probably Death Note fans, whose pseudonyms have somehow been snapped up in the trawl through genealogical cyber-space.

Name-list.com cannot suggest an origin for the name Wammy, though it does proffer the guess that those bearing it as a family name are probably Dutch or Indonesian.

Why not Russian or Australian, I don't know. They scored just as many.  One apiece for all.  And the USA should have owned it with a mighty haul of three Wammys within its borders.

However, the site did inform me what Wammy spelt backwards is Ymmaw, which seems worth knowing.  Plus the most common misspellings, namely Wsmmy Wammi Vvammy Wammya Wmamy Wamym.  Can't go wrong with that bit of knowledge under my belt.

British Wammy Surnames in the Genealogical Record!

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!
Wammy family genealogy
Wammy family history
Wammy surname history
Wammy demographics
Wammy ancestry

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Death Note in a 10th Grade Social Studies Textbook in South Korean Schools

14/4/2016

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Death Note's Light and L in Korean school textbook

South Korean 10th graders learn Social Studies via Death Note
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!
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Why is Matsuda Important to a Story like Death Note? (Analysis by Lua Cruz)

4/4/2016

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It’s always interesting to discuss the motivations or moral inclinations one could read in the characters of Death Note.

In most cases, as one considers how a character’s morality fits into the story, it’s rather easy to see the reasons why the character themselves are important. However, Matsuda doesn’t seem to be remarkable in the same way the other characters of Death Note are.

In fact, thinking about Matsuda made me realize his importance seems to rely mostly on the fact he is actually isn’t remarkable at all.

Matsuda doesn’t hold strong enough convictions to make his moral actions interesting on their own, and that’s what makes his moral actions unique in this context. He is there to show us the difference between the characters involved in the Kira case (the genius detectives as well as the more experienced law enforcement) and the people affected by the Kira case (regular people such as Light’s family).

As a police officer, Matsuda still lacks the resolve the older investigators have, and that, which appears to make him simple-minded or even stupid sounding, puts this character in the position of judging Kira not as law enforcement but as just another person who can see the criminality rates dropping.
Death Note's Matsuda thinks
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.

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A Physicist Looks at Death Note Matsuda's Handstand Balcony Jump (Guest Article by Liam Dodd)

4/4/2016

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A quick disclosure before you wander down this rabbit hole. Matti asked me look into the scene below and discuss the possibility and likeliness of such a series of events being plausible, before inevitably concluding with ’Yeah.. but no’.

I haven’t watched Death Note in about five years, but I’m a physicist by trade, and have worked a lot in science outreach, so have ended up becoming Matti’s go to for ’Is this science bonked or not?’.  I’ve also spent enough of my life online that I have picked up a certain set of skills that make dinner party conversations with me rather awkward. So anyway, enjoy.

Death Note Matsuda's Handstand on a Balcony Leap Scene (Ep 19: Matsuda)

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.
Death Note Matsuda on the balcony
You could argue that the people in the room are very predictable, or that the masterminds behind this plan had thought it through so well that they knew exactly what would happen, but I’ve struggled to get three friends to meet at the pub at the right time and that involved significantly less props.

I don’t remember the exact context of this event, but they must have been an easier way to do it, and one that had at least one built in  contingency.

But we’ll get back to my nitpicking later, let’s go through some of the physical events that happen.

There’s the fall, the catch, the thrown weight, the fake body, and the removal of the body.
We’ll start with the initial fall, because, well, it’s where the plan really takes off. We’ll get to the possible issues with this actual plan in a bit, but let’s focus on the physics of what is going on.

To be successful in landing on the mattress below, he needs to fall with almost no horizontal deviation. The overhand of the mattress below is marginal at best, and this is a necessary feature (as I’ll address later) for the plan to work at all.

Falling with only a vertical component is difficult, as any horizontal motion you gain will continue until you are able to correct it in some manner.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds. At low speeds your behaviour in free fall is similar to that of an astronaut on the ISS. Because there is no base for you to push against any movement you do will generally have minimal impact on your actual location, and instead will just cause you to rotate around the centre of mass.
Matsuda falls in Death Note
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.
So now we get to the next part which poses some problems: the mattress landing.

We have to assume that he is able to land on the mattress, but even landing on it isn’t a sure sign of success.

To illustrate this, I want you to go to your bedroom and lift your mattress over your head. Don’t worry, I’ll wait for you to come back.

It actually doesn’t matter when you have gone to get your mattress because the mental image of you struggling to lift is enough to amuse me, because as you would realise if you *had* attempted to lift the mattress, they’re really bendy.

Way too bendy to actually be reliable to do what the video shows. We see our daring protagonist land on the propped up mattress comfortably, and head into the room swiftly. There are a multitude of ways that this part of the plan could backfire horribly.

If any of you engaged in the typical childlike behaviours of the youthful, you may have jumped on your, or more likely your parents, bed. However, if you have ever tried to repeat this as an adult you may have realised that beds are actually quite crap for bouncing on.

If you apply any significant force to a mattress you just depress to the point where you are either resting on springs or leaning on the surface beneath.

This is going to be a lot worse when you have the mattress resting on single points or edges. When the mattress is propped on an edge (like in the scene) then most of the mattress can bend or morph to accommodate the new uninvited guest, but the part resting on the ledge can’t.

So the force applied here just crushes the mattress against the edge, so where there was a one a nice cushion separating you from smashing your ribs against the ledge, there is now just a few centimetres of incompressible fabric.

In other words, it’s going to hurt like hell.
Matsuda mattress rescue

The Manga
Funny Death Note Matsuda mattress bends

The Likely Reality
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
Impulse definition formula
But for more simple cases we can simplify it to:
Simplified impulse formula
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
Physics formula for velocity/momentum etc
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.
Death Note Ep 19 - Touta Matsuda on the mattress, where he's landed without injury. Soichiro Yagami looks on.

Death Note Ep 19 - Touta Matsuda on the mattress, where he's landed without injury. Soichiro Yagami looks on.
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.
suvat equation
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
Formula for Matsuda's fall Death Note
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.
Aiber as Matsuda in Death Note

Death Note's Aiber stands in (well sprawls in) as Matsuda's
supposed corpse for the viewing of Yotsuba executives. Wedy stands by
ready to scream as if witness to the fall and thud.
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.

Matsuda's Mattress Rescue: Implausible, but not Impossible

Death Note Touta Matsuda balcony Yotsuba
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.

Read more from Liam Dodd Physicist at his own website, where he's also linked the article published here.

Posted as Part of

Death Note News Month of Matsuda
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Analysing Light Ten Years After Death Note, Plus the Importance of Matsuda

1/4/2016

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Light Yagami Death Note
To mark the tenth anniversary of Death Note, there's a fabulous analysis of the manga's protagonist over on Anime News Network.

Under the heading Ten Years of Death Note: Is Light the Bad Guy?, columnist Jacob Hope Chapman takes a reasonably in-depth, albeit whistle-stop look not only at the character of Light Yagami himself, but how fans received him and how the author may have intended him to be.

There's a discussion on why people might accept mass murder and even justify the need - touching upon the darker impulses within us all; and whether insanity runs more rampant than merely with Kira.

Chapman brilliantly, and humorously, makes the case for Light Yagami being no 'anti-hero' nor erstwhile saviour, but a villain par excellence. Perhaps manga's most iconic villain at that.
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!

Everyman Matsuda - The Reader's Representative Within the Death Note Plot?

Chapman also talks about other characters in relation to Light Yagami (who is, after all, the focus of his analysis).

In particular he notes how Matsuda is too regularly dismissed as merely the idiot of the Death Note world.  When, upon closer inspection, it turns out that the young police officer holds a vital role within the narrative and its dramatis personæ.

Matsuda serves as an everyman, the character whose views act as a litmus test for the wider perspective of fashionable society.  As he wavers in support of Kira, then so do the greater Japanese masses.

If not an actual bellwether, then Matsuda certainly performs as a weathercock, testing the winds of public acclaim or disdain concerning Kira at any given juncture.
Matsuda Death Note anime
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:
Matsuda's emotional breakdown is one of the best parts of the show's finale because it just feels so right. Over time, without anyone noticing, Matsuda came to represent the everykid: all those normal Japanese millennials just trying to live their lives, maybe secretly posting defenses of Kira online, maybe just keeping their conflicted feelings to themselves, but open enough to the incredible change Kira had caused to feel like maybe condemning him wasn't fair. Of course there's something attractive about the idea of people who hurt others getting universally punished to create a more peaceful humanity. But it's just an idea, and when Matsuda is confronted with the reality of Kira—an egomaniacal brat who even killed his own dad to further his self-righteous empire—he feels more betrayed than anyone else.
~ Ten Years of Death Note: Is Light the Bad Guy?, Jacob Hope Chapman, Anime News Network (March 18th 2016)
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.

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Light is NOT a Sociopath - Excerpt from a Psychology Essay by Serria

29/2/2016

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Death Note's Light Yagami
Reproduced with permission from an essay originally, and fully, published at DEATH NOTES: an online source for Death Note Analysis and Discussion
(links at the end)

by Serria


Disclaimer: This is a fan essay, only for fun on my part with the hope of generating discussion. I'm well-aware that characters in any form of media are always open for interpretation, and this is just mine.

Light Yagami certainly has a reputation among the fandom, and that reputation isn't founded for pointlessly. The justice-toting boy-genius murdered thousands of people, most of which without so much as batting an eye. And he doesn't regret a single one.

On the contrary, he probably views each as a job well done. It isn't just the killing, either. Light claims each victim with boyish enthusiasm and possesses a childish demeanour that leads him to be competitive to the point of taunting the condemned with a sinister smile and dancing on their grave (literally, if he gets worked up enough). Yes, that's the Light Yagami we know, our unforgettable protagonist of Death Note.

Light is a killer. Light has no disturbed childhood to blame. Light voluntarily kills and once he found the Death Note, probably wouldn't be happy doing anything else. On those facts alone, we could infer any number of similar conclusions. I've heard Light called, by the morally concerned, disturbed. The face of evil. Hopelessly insane. And, most common of all, sociopath. The label insinuates a total lack of everything we call humanity. The inability to feel guilt for any wrongdoing, and thus, a total lack of conscience. If we chose to conclude that, then Light Yagami isn't normal, he isn't like you or me.

But the aforementioned facts are not all there is to Light Yagami, and it's a slam to the complexity - and, I emphatically insist, realism - of his character to assume as such merely because he kills. 'Killer' and 'sociopath' are not interchangeable words. The nature of the killing has to be taken into consideration. As far as the victim is concerned, murder is murder is murder, but not as far as the perpetrator is. The immediate fact of the matter is that sociopaths are, as a rule, self-focused and unable to empathize with the world or the people around him. This contradicts the very nature of Kira's legacy. Certainly there's the fact that Light was a bored, under-challenged genius in a society where he functioned solely on outward appearances and achievements, and certainly there's no doubt that a part of Light was perhaps waiting for the opportunity to test himself. But I honestly cannot conceive how this in any way discounts the fact that the reason Light took the opportunity he did was out of his zealous sense of idealism.

We know for a fact that Light has a societal conscience, beyond mere conditioning (if that were the case, Light wouldn't possess even half the passion that he does). The first chapter/first episode of the series is exclusively about Light's convictions. First, the shock at perhaps having actually taken a person's life, and then the total horror when he's tested it again and realized that he's killed people and yes, it's his fault. The anxiety he feels, that he's capable of feeling, does inexcusably deny him from the title of sociopath. Light is so disturbed by his actions that he can't eat, can't sleep, loses ten pounds in the first week and looks as though he's about to throw up. And finally, the resolution: doing this could make the world a better place. "Even if I sacrifice my mind and soul," Light states (even predicts). "The world is rotting. Someone has to do it." Light even acts initially under the impression that a Shinigami is going to come take his soul as soon as he's found, and when Ryuk arrives he's surprised that he's not going to be punished. Agree with his methods or not, it wouldn't be wrong to call Light's ambition selfless, wanting to "protect the weak" and "make a perfect world" without, as far as the text writes, asking in return for anything conventional such as money, sex, or political power (which also separates him from being a dictator, by definition).

Some argue the sincerity of Light's resolve as being only an excuse to jump at the chance to ease his boredom. I don't personally think that's fair, but nonetheless, the very fact that Light experiences such vivid anxiety before impulsively engaging in such risky behavior already excludes him from the title.

Now to get technical. "Sociopath" isn't a medical term, and though it has general uses it's not a proper diagnosis. When talking about sociopaths/psychopaths in the psychology field, most often we're talking about Antisocial Personality Disorder. The brief definition as listed in the DSM-IV is "The essential feature for the diagnosis is a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood." Sure, that's pretty vague and by that sentence alone, I'd agree without a doubt that Light is quick to violate the human rights of others, in particular the right to life (but let it be stated that the same can be said of L, Near and Mello). But the criteria goes beyong that. First, we can't quite call Light an APD at the beginning of the series - one has to be an adult aged at least 18. Furthermore, APDs ought to have a history of conduct disorder (breaking the law, inappropriate actions, truancy, running away from home, etc) since before the age of 15. I think it's safe to say that the Yagami's golden boy who so emphatically values the law hasn't even come close. Also, APDs are known for drug and alcohol abuse, which again, does not apply...

To read more, please visit DEATH NOTES and Serria's original posting of her Kira essay: Light is NOT a Sociopath.

DEATH NOTES is an invaluable resource for those who like a bit of academia in their reading of the Death Note manga.  Largely inactive now,  its archives nevertheless contain a rich bounty of timeless essays written during the period when Death Note was first coming to the attention of international audiences and readers.  The site's essayists emanate from varying disciplines within the academe, with less formal - sometimes downright flippant - pieces interspersed for flavour.

The excerpt above was republished here with permission from DEATH NOTES' editor Jennifer Fu.

Posted as part of

Month of Kira
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Whom Would Your Death Note Kill?

28/2/2016

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Death Note falling gif

Surely all who ever read the manga, watched the anime, or enjoyed the films and TV drama have pondered its central point:

     If a Death Note dropped and landed in your lap;
     if you were guaranteed that it worked
     and nobody knew that you had it;
     what then?


I'm certain each of us have silently amused ourselves harmlessly thinking psychopathic thoughts. Surprising ourselves by shocking into open daydream hitherto unknown and unsavoury cerebral indulgences. Serial killing tendencies that may otherwise have never crossed our minds.
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. 
Doesn't it?  It's not just disappointment in politics playing out not as you would wish.

I mean, people can get killed there with the latter signing their name on scraps of paper.  Directives to bomb and bills to suspend indifferently yet another civil liberty.  It could be you. And anyway, foreign victims over there shouldn't be nameless, unavenged. We're all brothers and sisters in this world.

Politicians are the actual Kiras of the Real World.  Writing in their notebooks of death. Thus we should do that too.  Practically obligatory.  Self-defence. Poetic justice. 

But it's all a matter of scale and we're in Yagami country now, as regards to our moral compass.
Death Note Light Yagami - if someone actually dies, does that make me a murder?
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.

More Month of Kira Philosophy

  • Nathaniel Overthinks Death Note #04: The Utilitarianism of Light Yagami
  • The Concept of Kira: Can you Really say Light Yagami is the God of the New World? (Guest Post by Lua)
  • The Unattainable Perfect World - Excerpt from an Essay about Kantian Ethics and Kira by Andrew Capuano

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More Month of Kira Discussion & Debate

  • What If Light Yagami Wasn't Japanese? What Would Death Note Look Like Then?
  • Did Kira Fail by Punishing not Preventing Crime? Leila Lawliet M Thinks Not
  • Light Yagami - Hero or Villain? Analysis and Discussion (Guest Video by Riconius)
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