Death Note Analysis
This has always been one of my favorite anime's as well as one of my first in like 1st grade. I thorughly enjoyed rewatching this anime. It is interesting how the last few works such as Sensoron, Akira, Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood, and now Death Note have all been built on is idea of power as well as morality. Inittially, Light Yagami represents going through the mundanity of life as a high school student he says "day in and day out the same thing over and over again." Yet, he still has ideals that the world is rotten even before recieving the death note. He quickly adapts ideals that say "if one or two people like him were going to die no one would care." He goes from killing someone holding hostages, to someone harassing a girl, to random people for his own agenda (the 12 agents he kills). Light is a person who seems to never be satisfied. Even while recieving the best grades, with a supportive mom who asks him if he wants anything, he responds he doesn't want anything at all. Which I find to be interesting as he gets no enjoyment it seems from anything else besides killing people with the death note. We see the joy he recieves from the death note and ridding the world of "rot" as he alreay has 2 pages filled of names before Ryuk even comes down into the human world. His intention is to create a world without eveil by doing something thats objectively evil in the eyes of society, murder. It creates an ethical question of whether murder is valid when it has to do with people who are not morally ethical in society throguh their crimes. Light thought he was chosen to be this "god of the new world" because he was smart, but it was simply based off of luck that Ryuk dropped the notebook there. He has a god complex and says "someone has to do it, In fact only i can do it" he believes he's truly a god of this new world he is trying to rid of "evil." Yet, this world is already tainted because he himself is commiting acts of evil in the process. This anime also deals with the ethical issue of the true intentions and feelings behind society. Light states that "of course humans would say it's wrong because they must put up a front like that in public. But their true feelings are there." If this happened in real life, I wonder how many people would support Kira's agenda as both kira and L both believe they're this idea of "justice" and "judgement" but in different ways. As mentioned before, the act of the death note dropping in the human world to Light Yagami is simply an act of luck. Yet, Watari and L both think if Kira was an ordinary person who gained the power to kill, he is very unlucky. The idea of luck is constant throughout the series it seems.
I like how your reflection touches on one of Death Note's moral paradox of justice through immoral means. I could never not see Light as the Nietzschean "Ćbermensch" ideal---someone who places himself beyond conventional morality to reshape the world, and the very backwardness of both Light and the Ćbermensch




















