Death Note, a chess match with a god complex

Light spoilers ahead, including the shape of the ending.

Death Note was almost certainly my second anime, watched not long after Cowboy Bebop and, again, on Craig’s recommendation. Like most of these, I came to it well after it had aired and everyone else had already moved on.

The half I’d cut

I’m firmly in the camp that the first part of the series is far better than the second. I don’t know the production history, but it plays like a show that could have been just that first stretch of episodes, the original cat-and-mouse, and then jumped to the finale. Instead, partway through, it basically restarts the whole premise with a new set of people trying to figure out who has the Death Note and who Light Yagami really is, running the same chase a second time. The ending itself is genuinely great. If you took that weaker second act, trimmed it down, and used it to bridge the first part to that ending, you’d have a nearly perfect show.

What it is, and why it works

At its core, Death Note is a chess match. Light gets a notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it, starts executing criminals to remake the world in his image, and the authorities bring in a detective to catch him. The whole thrill is the two of them circling each other, each trying to out-think the other with incomplete information.

I love the visual style, all that dramatic lighting and gothic flair. And I love the first opening theme, “the WORLD,” with my whole heart. When the show later swaps it out for that screaming second opening, I checked out of the intro entirely. Not for me.

I also love how much the show cares about the rules. The Death Note has this whole elaborate rulebook, write the name while picturing the face, the timing, the cause of death, and the series actually walks you through how this world works instead of hand-waving it. I like the main character, I like his shinigami, the god of death who dropped the notebook out of boredom, and I like that the lore gets explained rather than left as vague mysticism.

The smartest dumb guy alive

Here is the thing I could never get past, in the most fun way. The smartest move for Light would have been to simply do nothing. Turn the TV off, stop taking the bait, live his life. If he had never engaged, never deliberately gotten close to the investigation to toy with it, nobody could ever have found him. How would they? But his ego won’t allow it. He keeps walking straight into traps because he can’t resist proving he’s the cleverest person in the room.

So my favorite pastime while watching was yelling at the screen. Light is convinced he’s the smartest man in the world, and he’s actually one of the dumbest, because his arrogance is the exact thing that undoes him every single time. Watching a genius lose to his own god complex never got old.

Image credits

The photo is shared under a Creative Commons license from Wikimedia Commons:

• Mamoru Miyano (Japanese voice of Light), by Dick Thomas Johnson, CC BY 2.0.