| I Hope None Of My Friends Like Death Note |
[Mar. 19th, 2008|11:45 pm] |
I was trying to avoid making a post this Holy Week. I really was. Well, at least it's late at night on a generic Wednesday, and not Maundy Thursday or anything.
But ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) eslington linked the TV Tropes site on his journal, and I followed it to the Advance Wars page, from which I springboarded onto every other trope page that even remotely caught my interest. I slept at 4 am, I have no idea what I was thinking.
Anyway, somewhere between 'Magnificent Bastard' and 'The Xanatos Roulette' tropes, I stumbled upon an editorial comment attached to one of the examples. The self-proclaimed site 'tropers' were talking about Death Note, and one of them said something to the effect that Kira's methods may be questionable, but his/her point is that it works.
Oh, how nice. Except that, you know, it doesn't fucking work. It only goddamn works because the mangaka says so.
Kira uses an undetectable, unescapable method to kill hundreds, maybe thousands of criminals whose faces and names are shown in mainstream media, causing a precipitous drop in the crime rate. If this state of affairs continues, it may be inferred that all crime eventually disappear, thus fulfilling Kira's dream of 'making the world a better place' ('... a better place for me to rule!!!' the huge dick goes on to say, but that's largely immaterial to what I'm going on about right now).
Bull.
Law of unintended consequences: criminals would just have a bigger motivation not to get arrested in the first place, that's all. In fact, they might go as far as always killing all the witnesses just to avoid the risk of being identified. The crime rate may go down for a while, but once it becomes apparent that only perps with police records need fear Kira, a stealthier, stronger breed of ninja criminal will form, and we'll be back where we started.
In fact, the ones who'll be really terrified are the innocent folks who've been wrongly convicted or even just wrongly accused of something. Kira just goes through the bodies and lets God sort them out later.
I used to be alright with the death sentence, but my time in college studying philosophy made me change my mind. Crime won't go away just because you start killing criminals. It will only make crime adapt accordingly. And this isn't even mentioning all the other big, juicy social and moral issues that the death penalty brings up. In Death Note, it just won't fucking work, and I didn't even have to try hard to figure it out.
What really, really bugs me is that I have to figure it out at all. My brother enjoyed Death Note, but only because it's a shounen story, and he was entertained by the situational interplay between the characters. He in no way approves of the main character's murderous methods. But the trouble is, there are a lot of others who do.
I didn't want to hate Death Note. I really didn't. Hate is corrosive and self-destructive, and overall not very nice to feel. But everytime I encounter Death Note on the internet, especially in the context of fannish approval and admiration for Kira and his actions, it challenges my temper in ways I've not let a work of fiction do in a long time.
Oh, but wait, Mads! You must be forgetting about the Shinigami Eyes, the ability that costs you half of your projected lifespan, but allows you to know a person's name just by looking at them, even through mass media! Wouldn't the bearer of the Death Note then be able to find and kill even criminals who've never been apprehended, thereby solving the problem of the return of crime?
( A valid point, so let me outline my rebuttal point by point under this cut. )
Finally, I mean every word, but I'm not really all that emotionally invested in this. I won't froth at the mouth anytime anyone mentions Death Note. But it's always fun to speak like it affects me personally, and if I'm going to hate anything, I may as well use it to indulge in some comedically exaggerated anger. Even if it may just be funny only to myself.
Godspeed.
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