There's good taste on show in Nebraska, as students are urged to watch Death Note on Netflix.

Writing for The Daily Nebraskan - independent student paper for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln - journalist Wade Ronspies wrote that the Death Note anime is 'truly one of the most tense and harrowing offerings on Netflix'.

This is after he dismissed anime's apparent local reputation as being just 'for nerds'.  It's a fair cop this end, but is that a deserved statement throughout?  And if so, do we think that's necessarily a bad thing? 

Nerd and proud!  Assuming nerd means the same in dreary, old Blighty, as it does in the windswept plains of the USA's Nebraska.  What does nerd mean to you?  And does enjoying anime, and by extension Death Note, fit into that category?

And more to the point, why do labels apply to our own persona based solely on what we watch, read, listen to or otherwise enjoy?  And should we take notice of them, let alone take care to tag upon ourselves only those labels incurring an identification with which we might live?

The sociologist in me is fighting at the bit to answer, but I'd be more interested in what you'd have to say.

Ronspies finished with extolling the virtues of new experience for his student readership, 'It may be different from what you normally watch, and that’s exactly why you owe it to yourself to watch “Death Note.”'

Read more at Netflix Pick of the Week: 'Death Note' by Wade Ronspies (The Daily Nebraskan, November 18th 2015) and catch the anime Death Note at Netflix, or indeed check out our Death Note anime selection right here at Death Note News.

Looking to debate Death Note with fellow political scientists and sociologists?  If you're a student or associate of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, you can do just that with an event scheduled for later this month.

Death Note is the subject of the first in a month long analysis of anime at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).  Members of the prestigious university's Political and Social Science Department (Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales) will be meeting to debate aspects of the show.

Their Death Note analysis and debate event will be held on November 17th 2015, at 1pm, in the Lucio Mendieta y Núñez Room, at UNAM's campus in Mexico City. 

It's unclear whether members of the public are also free to attend.  If you wish to participate, then contacting the faculty itself may be the way forward.

If you find out - on behalf of everybody else - please do report back and we'll update this accordingly.

The morality of Death Note is curious thing, not least because the complex themes Ohba raises in his manga are unintentional.

When examining the themes of Death Note we as a fandom have a lot of input. Death Note is the perfect slate for a variety of interpretations because Ohba himself didn’t have much in mind outside his desire to entertain his readership. When interviewed he said that he saw a magazine article about the themes of the series he stated that it was “too difficult for me to understand”  and the creation of the “deep philosophical themes” of Death Note were a by-product of their desire to entertain, not the other way around.

He’s even on record as saying “some people may have been taking the series too seriously”!  (Which in writing this article I’m probably falling into the category of). He was pressed about this topic and did eventually say “no human has the right to pass judgement on another’s actions. No one should play God”; but this seems to be retrospective analysis rather than something he had in mind while writing the series.
 
Nevertheless, whether Ohba intended to or not his series raises many valid ideas and paves way for multiple readings; not just the one I’m about to offer. The risk in approaching Death Note is to view it with too strong a Western perspective when characters like Soichiro Yagami are so clearly eastern. Nevertheless, it’s through this lens I will (partially) view it because of my greater familiarity with Western philosophy.

The three main ideologies characters could be argued to have in the series are Utilitarianism, Confucianism (with a touch of Kantianism) and Nihilism.  We'll start this month with the middle one.

Light’s father Soichiro Yagami is a fundamentally eastern character with a highly Confucian mind-set. Confucianism (similar, but not identical to the Western philosophy of Kantianism) emphasises collective duty to the whole of society and that the ends never justifies the means!

Soichiro values his family above all other things, and his duty as a police officer next. He was the first to agree to stay on with L after the police force stopped investigating the Kira case, and his guilt in saving his daughter lead him to accept the Shinigami eyes and ultimately die for his cause. He risks his life numerous times during the Kira investigation and his passion for justice makes him an incredible workaholic (his family often had to deliver clothes to him because he worked such long hours, this caused Light to meet Naomi while he was delivering them to him; too her eternal misfortune).

Ohba has stated that Soichiro Yagami is the only “good” person in Death Note.
 
Despite his dedication to catch Kira, he has his limits of what he perceives as morally permissible to do so and he certainly doesn’t espouse the idea “that the ends justify the means”. This objection is revealed multiple times throughout the investigation; most notably when L wishes to allow criminals mentioned by Yotsuba to die in order to incriminate the organisation. Soichiro opposes on the grounds that “even if they are criminals” it’s unethical to allow them to die even if it is to solve the case.  To make this clear, they arguably stand to gain more by allowing these criminals to die (and to be fair, we aren’t talking about purse snatchers here in most cases) since if they can apprehend the Yotsuba Group, more people will be saved from Kira.

Looking it at it from a more Kantian perspective all humans have an intrinsic value, and can never be a means to an end because their intelligence and sentience makes them an end in of themselves meaning things such as murder and lying (which Light does with impunity) never acceptable.
 
The song sung by Soichiro in Death Note the Musical - Honour Bound and Bound by Honesty - has a distinctly Eastern feeling to it; enhancing his Confucian and Japanese associations.

At the heart of Soichiro Yagami’s character is a man who struggles between his duty to his family and his duty to remain impartial as a police officer. This ultimately leads him to consider committing suicide after he’s forced to hand over the Death Note to Mello to get his daughter, Sayu, back. 

Other versions of Death Note enhance this very Japanese perspective further. In the Death Note  drama, Soichiro Yagami commits suicide with the Death Note after uncovering his son’s identity as Kira. This harkens back to the honour killings that were once common in Japan; most infamously with Kamikaze pilots. Since Soichiro Yagami cannot bring himself to kill his son (that would be a violation of his duty to his family) he kills himself since he failed in his duty to raise a morally upright son.

A trio of Death Note News columnists are about to come on board, with the first being posted later on today.  Yep, that's right. You wait two years for one, and three of them turn up at once!  It's all very exciting.

So who have we got for you?

The first monthly column will be penned by New Zealander Nathaniel Brown - a man who subscribes to several Schools of Thought.  At least when he's applying them to Death Note.

A thinker and a philosopher, Nathaniel will be leading us through some of the great theories and worldly perspectives across the range of human experience.  But doing it all through the lens of Death Note characters, plot-lines and whatever else from manga, anime or live action might illuminate the angle taken.

It might be Aristotle, Descartes, Confucius or whomever, depending upon the month, but what I can guarantee is that it'll be enjoyable. 

No Philosophy degree needed to read and contribute to the debate. Just a willingness to join with Nathaniel as he over thinks Death Note, all in the name of fun.

Look for his inaugural column in an hour or two from now.

No idea if that's what the column will ultimately be called, as this welcome to the team is very fresh, and we're yet to fine tune the details.

Yet Lucas King himself is no stranger to Death Note News.  He's guest blogged before and orchestrated for himself an instant fan-base, when he composed those missing Death Note themes for Matt.

Lucas will be taking a wider view of the musical array in Death Note tunes - from soundtracks to tributes, across the spectrum of canon, fanon and all the rest. Probably.  Like I said, it's early days yet and anything still is possible.

An original composer of Death Note music himself - albeit from the fandom community - Lucas King's occasional column for Death Note News promises to be insightful, expert and downright entertaining.  Find it in the future and enjoy.

Talking about looking to the future, do you recall that moment in the Death Note anime when Near laid out his tarot deck and turned them over to shocking symbolism? 

There was Death staring straight back at us. Chilling in any context but one which habitually has a Shinigami prancing about in full view upon our screens.

Also utterly erroneous in its reading, according to long-time connoisseur of these cards and Death Note fan, Tarot Mikami.  Loving the play on words in that pseudonym there!

'Probably monthly',  her Death Note News column will explore the genre and story through the literary device of the Fool's Journey. Along the way, you'll learn how to read tarot cards, not only with reference to Death Note - though that's how we'll come to understand it - but using any deck you care to handle.

We'll also find out why Near's tarot scene was all about the imagery and nothing to do with the reading (well, who would have thought...?).  Sneaky boy.

Death Note Tarot Tales with Tarot Mikami will appear anon, almost certainly within the next couple of weeks.  Another fabulous new insight into our favourite manga universe.

I've just been giggling and cheering my way through a most enjoyable set of academic Death Note articles.

Casuistor uses Tumblr to rant regarding realism in Death Note. Then occasionally dives into a subject armed with calculators, text-books and (one would presume judging by the narrative) some kind of medical qualification.

I'm a mere First Aid at Work certificate holder, and I was nodding away at the sheer blatant idiocy in some canon goofs pointed out here. Casuistor goes much, much further. The writer not only highlights what couldn't possibly have occurred as per plot, but explains what would have happened instead.

Fan fiction writer's fodder right there.

Which is pretty much how I found the first of these analyses on Death Note.

In my novels, I tried to keep everything within the canon universe. Even if, for the sake of realism, I had to do the writing equivalent of a few triple twist somersaults to turn those story-lines into something which could occur in reality.

However, the one notable place in which I baulked at the prospect was Mello's explosion injuries. I couldn't square the state of his face with him meandering into Hal's shower three days later.  So I inserted a random year into my fan-fiction timeline, just to give him some time to recover.

Casuistor covered the same improbable nature of Mello's ''tis but a scratch' attitude towards extensive third degree burns across a quarter of his body. Or, as the blogger puts it,

Which now has me dying to have Casuistor check out My Own Way, to see if I did better in fan fiction than Ohba did in canon. But I can't do that to the poor love. Some things can't ever be unread.

But Sacrifice should be read, with great enjoyment and a whole lot of enlightenment, wherein you'll find such gems as:

• Calculating Kira's Kill-Count in Death Note Canon
• Was Teru Mikami Schizoid?
• Light was not a Virgin

And a lot more besides.  You're welcome. Enjoy!

Yet all we ever focus upon is her childish personality, as noisily expressed in all its banal, shallow conversation; her strange, but stylish fashion sense; and her tragic relationship with Light (plus exploitation by the same).

None of us quite registering that Misa killed people long before Light came onto the scene.

Nor did she have any compulsion to target only those deemed 'guilty' by any moral code - be it societal consensus, state law or personal judgement. She used her Death Note to murder anyone who it occurred to her to do at the time.

Including those pretty much used as leverage in a terror campaign.

All this and more is highlighted and picked over by Pseudomiracle's Teruzuki -
who also reaches some conclusions as to why we're all so willing to ignore Misa's darker predilections as second Kira.

Can we say gender bias and sloppy story-telling? 

Fully illustrated, with every point raised supported by Misa images from the manga - demonstrating quite clearly where we're missing a trick or ten (or several trillion), blind-sided by banal chatter and romantic sentiments - it's very much worth the read.

Check out Teruzuki's take on the matter on Tumblr, in her Pseudomiracle journal entry entitled:  Some thoughts on Misa’s presumed victim status and the strange absolution of all her crimes for no apparent reason.

So! Kanji is copied from Chinese, basically. However, Chinese and Japanese have different pronunciations. One example I can think of is the Kanji for suki. In Japanese, the translation is "to like", and is pronounced "suki". In Chinese, however, it means "good" and is pronounced "hao".

Kanji has many different pronunciations depending on the Kanji and what it is paired with. In anime, they are allowed to play with this a bit in order to create fictional names. Tsugumi Ohba, the creator of Death Note, was quite careful in this regard, both with the criminals Light killed, and Light himself. He did not want to "hurt anyone's feelings" by using their name.

A lot of different anime do this, actually. There's a well known example from Naruto, the character of Haruno Sakura. While Sakura is a common name, if you put her name together, it translates to "haru no sakura", or "the spring's cherry blossom".

How does this tie into Yagami Light? Well, his name is spelled night god moon. The first Kanji is the sign for "night" or "yoru", the second is God or "kami", and the last one is for "moon" or "tsuki".

How does kami become gami? Without going too far into linguistics, Kanji change letters depending on what they are paired with. So kami becomes gami. Namely, Yagami.

It is really just a case of "oooh, look, I can make these sounds by pairing these Kanji together!" Most people would pronounce moon as "tsuki", but the creator chose to say it is pronounced as Light. This follows a trend my sensei says as "kira kira" (ironically this translates to sparkle) names, where you choose random Kanji and say what they mean.

This bit is total guesswork on my part, but having light, dark, and God kind of shows Light's duality as a character.

Imagine how short the story would be if Kira's Death Note wasn't bound by so many rules, or if the shinigami eyes came without a cost. 

Moreover, contemplate how utterly tedious that telling might be.

These are the considerations occupying Kinetic Literature's Kuiper in a thought provoking article entitled Death Note and Sanderson’s Second Law of Magic.

Running with Bruce Sanderson's assertion that 'limitations are more important than powers' in magical fantasy tales, Kuiper takes another look at Death Note.  The adage holds up to scrutiny when applied to its supernatural elements - magic as represented here by the notebook(s) and shinigami deals.

Not their awesome power, but their fatally corruptive powerlessness is more than merely important. It's fundamental to the plot.

Musing upon that 2nd Law, I'm struck by how often its true beyond successful story-weaving of magical universes.  The most compelling characterisation (or inanimate objects) frequently comes in what is missed, lost or otherwise undermining the efforts of protagonists. 

Just think MacBeth in his mindless ambition, manipulated by his missus and misinterpreting the clues set out by the Wyrd Sisters; Heathcliff in his damaged mind and sensibilities, his suffering of abuse transforming him into a bully; or Jane Eyre's 'plainness' blinding people to the fact that she was actually quite radical in her Feminism for her Victorian era.

Where would those stories be if Jane Eyre was pretty enough to be snapped up by the first passing fancy, long before Rochester ever clapped eyes on her?  Or if MacBeth had common sense enough to say, 'Hold on! Wtf am I doing?'  Or if Heathcliff had just punched Hareton in the gob within days of being brought to Wuthering Heights, disdained Cathy as being a bit too shallow and selfish for his love-starved psyche and grown up accordingly as a well-adjusted member of society?

Short. That's what.  And boring.  Tales not worth the classic tags and endless reprint editions.

That same fascinating propensity towards fatal flaws can also be seen in the personalities of Death Note: 

• Soichiro Yagami is a kick ass police officer, stately with moral integrity and persistent in his bid to bring in the bad guys.  But his blind spot for his son, born of paternal love, means that his otherwise great attributes cannot succeed.
• Misa Amane has so much love to give, but its direction leaves her open to its exploitation.  Halving her life and pressed into ever more murderous pursuits.
• Matt's powers of observation are said - in Death Note 13: How to Read - to be truly amazing. But his proneness to boredom, when 'looking at the same thing, which never changes', denied his ability to utilize such skills, as Kira and crew escaped their hideout over the road.
• Light's megalomania curtailed his chances to slip under the radar, writing on without detection, as much as the magical constrictions inherent in his Death Note.  As soon as he began to believe his own hype, clues were scattered in his wake, rendering his eventual downfall inevitable.

In such insertions come the brilliant hooks of story-telling.  They carry the plot-line into creating a manga classic, standing the test of time and providing endless subject for discussion amongst its on-going fandom.

Such I think was recognized by Tsugumi Ohba.  The power of limitation in personality is pretty much spelled out by Near at the end there.  He acknowledged that he was flawed and so was Mello.  But together they made good each other's deficiencies. 

Thus embracing their individual powerlessness - and rejecting the crippling restriction imposed by Wammy's House in solving cases competitively - they were able to surpass L in bringing down Kira.

I'm with Sanderson and Kuiper alike.  The story is in the limitation and that truly is its magic at its most elementary.

My first thought was 'Oh! Come on! It's so much more than that!', shortly followed by 'Mmm, ok, it's a fair cop.'  I don't even think that she was dismissing Death Note as being particularly crap. The very fact that it factored into her piece shows that it's worthy of comparison with a story that she obviously enjoys. Moreover, it sets Death Note up as the benchmark by which the rest of the genre is judged.

One of the reasons why Death Note so captured my imagination was the 'social thriller' aspect. The notion that power is usually seen as such a distant thing, particularly by teenage schoolboys, coupled with a sudden presentment of absolute power and what happens next, that's what drew me in. The fact that we weren't given a black and white notion of right and wrong was another biggie. So much was left for the reader to determine for themselves.

Those initial dilemmas faced by Light put me in mind of something that Mark Twain said. I haven't got the exact quotation at hand, but the paraphrase is - if we knew for certain that there were no consequences, which of us wouldn't kill? 

I like to think the answer is 'most of us', but then situations and circumstances float through your mind. And if you had a Death Note in your grasp, wouldn't you scribble down a name or two?  If you thought you could avert a war, or end abuse, or... suddenly the list extends into increasingly greyer areas.

That's the appeal of Death Note, to play out our darker fantasies against a what if and maybe world.

Then suddenly it's all about this:

But that's thrilling too!  The clash between Light and L (then Near/Mello/Matt and L) belongs in that category where we also find Sherlock and John Watson. It's about a meeting of minds, clues sought and found, red herrings thrown, geniuses trying to thwart each other at every turn.

Which isn't quite the same story as when it began, is it?

I'm not sure that we have the like of the Wammy kids in real life. At least, I hope we don't, because that institution looked like serious exploitation of vulnerable children to me.  In fact, now it's ALL about the power play! The thing that attracted me to this scenario - the Mark Twain stance on ethics by peer pressure - is no longer part of the plot.

There ARE consequences for Kira. They come in the shape of the Wammy kids with whomever else each side chooses to drag along. As pretty much everyone states time and time again, it's all about winning the competition and solving the puzzle. Matters of morality seem to slip away entirely by the close of the first arc.

So maybe Ms Ekens is right, along with whomever she's quoting. Death Note is a 'power fantasy in social thriller's clothing', and we can only assume that it was Tsugumi Ohba's fantasy, in which we all merely came along for the ride.

What do you think?