I absolutely could not be trusted with such a book. That being said, I should absolutely have it,
hhmm… sounds trustworthy!
our university had a book that actually killed a person via falling on their head. it was encased in this bulky jacket with metal edges. and for whatever reason it was relatively high up the bookshelf and the bookshelf was quite old and falling apart. So one day some dude decided to pull out a book from this bookshelf and it buckled and that bulky jacket book cracked his head open.
I think a lot of people ignore the main issue with Death Note. I don’t view it as depicting how anyone would be corrupted by power.
Light Yagami started out with an overinflated ego and impaired self control by virtue of being a teenager with good grades. He likely was also already a psychopath (though you can’t give that diagnosis to a minor). He’s effectively the male Japanese version of Elizabeth Holmes. That’s what led to him becoming a megalomaniac.
Not everyone starts off with that set of circumstances, and conversely not everyone would go down the same route. But that’s not the story the author wanted to write nor the story the audience wanted to consume. A good person using the Death Note to fix the world would get old really fast because there’s little tension and intrigue. But someone being correpted by power down a path of evil? That’s a story that can be interesting
Light Yagami started out with an overinflated ego and impaired self control by virtue of being a teenager with good grades. He likely was also already a psychopath (though you can’t give that diagnosis to a minor). He’s effectively the male Japanese version of Elizabeth Holmes. That’s what led to him becoming a megalomaniac.
Should be noted how Misa Amane isn’t really corrupted, just gulled into Light’s cult of celebrity and used up by his machinations.
I think a few more characters with a hand on the Death Note would have made the story better, to play out it’s influence on the user.
Watched it for the first time this month, such a banger show
I’d run out of pages fast writing down every russian that’s responsible for genociding Ukrainians.
I mean, killing those that want others dead for the crime of existing seems pretty water tight on morals and corruption. Don’t stray from that rule and you should be fine.
That doesn’t solve the issue of you not having perfect information, which the post alludes to.
List of KKK members, done. List of proud boy members, done. They don’t exactly make it difficult to deduce.
Do we really need perfect information for the likes of Trump, Putin, et al?
yeah, light literally monologes about becoming god of the world like…5m after confirming the book is real. dude clearly had issues
What about people who make fun of my farts
They already ded, they just still walking.
Ah so you’d kill all of the members of Hamas then. That’s what you obviously meant, because you everyone agrees on which people you mean when you say “those that want others dead for the crime of existing.” Completely water tight! Definitely not at all dependent on the arbitrariness of which information you’ve been exposed to.
So you want others who want others dead for the crime of existing, dead for the crime of existing?
Exactly. You get it ! You have to be intolerant of the intolerant.
It isn’t a difficult concept. x wants nightlily dead for being German. y wants x dead for wanting Germans to be dead.
It isn’t recursive.
Question. If someone autographs that book would it be considered suicide? I am seriously curious about the legal implications here.
i would be afraid of the shinigami like do you imagine how creepy they would look irl
There are multiple live action adaptations
I would kill people that don’t deserve it (no one deserves it really), but those people, or rather groups of people, are inherently intertwined with the maintenance and proliferation of global power structures that feed off of inequality and suffering.
Their sudden absence will have unforeseeable consequences of course, but the world will be incredibly more based without them.
(no one deserves it really)
I call bullshit. Would you claim Hitler, Stalin, or Mao didn’t deserve death?
Be careful when speaking in absolutes. The world is rarely black/white
Well, yeah. I believe in rehabilitive incarceration. Of course they likely wouldn’t be let out ever again, and given their control of their countries military; killing them would likely be the only option (unless we had a death note >:3).
*Like they would have mandatory cognitive therapy which would create opportunities for them to right their wrongs as much as possible by communicating their new thought processes to their ‘followers’.
The issue is that with a death note, you’re a global power structure that feeds off inequality and suffering now.
that feeds off inequality and suffering now
How would that have any connection to a Death Note? You can’t just throw that accusation out there without logic backing it up
Getting murdered sucks. Being friends or family of someone who got murdered sucks. Using the Death Note inflicts great suffering.
As long as the Death Note user remains anonymous they can avoid any sort of accountability, while they can hold others accountable to whatever standards they wish. Using the Death Note creates inequality between the holder and everyone else.
I’m pretty sure i’d be fine with it. Not because I’m special with perfect morals or sneaky and good at keeping below the radar, but because already nobody cares I exist, and only a handful even know. I’m invisible, and not interested in fame or whatever contrived nonsense, and my sleep schedule is a disaster, so nothing would point to me.
But if the worst people on earth start committing suicide at the end of a video of them divulging their deepest darkest secrets in great detail, you’ll know it was me.
If you gave me the Death Note no one would ever see it again. Not even me.
∗falls to death∗
Honestly in the right hands that book could do a lot of good very quickly
Seriously. Also, I can’t imagine what good people I would write down after being corrupted by power that would outweigh the first three names I would choose immediately after getting the book.
Same as the death penalty IRL. You can’t know that person x is guilty and that person x not existing will make things better.
Counterpoint - you can know if leader of country x is guilty of killing others if they say they’ve done it quite openly and want to do more of it.
Perhaps, but then you kill that person and the power vacuum that is now created is likely to attract someone so much worse. There is no guarantee the next person will be better than the current one, and if the next one is worse, it would be your doing.
Then just get rid of the next monster. Eventually the hierarchy will learn and reform, if by no other means than by the individuals corrupting the structure being eliminated
Killing a leader doesn’t get rid of the position of power that enabled their misdeeds.
No, the position is occupied by the next monster. And so on. And so on. Dang, that’s such a nifty way of getting rid of sociopaths!
The entire theme of Death Note is that power turns people into sociopaths and that no matter how many “bad people” you kill you will never actually succeed in cleansing the world of evil, but I guess no matter how ham-fisted you make it people will still miss the point. It’s funny that a lot of people complain that Light has an unrealistically naive view of morality and yet this comment section seems to be teeming with people who are equally immature.
I’m built different.
Never watched it.
Eventually you run out of monsters to fill the position (and the supporting positions below). At that point you now have people willing to make positive changes in the world in positions of power
That is not how it works at all, and it’s actually a very childish way of thinking. There is not some finite pool of monsters these positions of power draw from, the positions of power make the monsters. “Power corrupts” is the most common trope in fiction since the advent of fiction for a reason and it’s baffling that so many people still don’t get it.
Then the replacement uses it as justification to further that endeavor.
Deathnote can kill in any way you want as long as it’s realistic. Not sure how they’d figure it out. Which means that at some point people will start to think divine intervention, especially if ending the war stops the heart attacks / eagle attacks / flag poles falling on said leader, or whatever other symbolism you’d choose.
So many corrupt preachers are gonna get struck by lighting…
The sci-fi version of that is “we built the torment nexus from that famous book ‘don’t build the torment nexus’”
I’d just write the names of the entire Republican Party
That’s why they use fake names. To protect themselves.
if you’re doing that don’t forget the non gop that jump ship and conveniently vote with the gop in minimum quantities to win the vote. or just be lazy and all the politicians that aren’t demonstrably not evil
That is way, way, way too many people. Being summarily murdered from afar should be reserved for people currently engaged in a genocide or major war crimes. Not their milquetoast lackeys.
Okay then let me just check my notes on who that would be
the entire Republican party
Neat
I guess now we know why those stories are told as allegories for why we shouldn’t give power over life and death to people. But usually the protagonist needs to slide into abusing their power. Blood thirsty mitherfucker. Smh.
Says the centrist who’s fine with claiming to take the moral high ground so long as they can stay confortable
How many elementary schools do they need to bomb before they’re evil enough for you? How many pointless wars? You good with the actions of ICE, no murders there? Women dying in their cars from pregnancy related issues cool too? These people are mass murderers all ready.
Sounds like you would have let the Nazis go after Hitler died.
To be clear I’m not talking about Bob down the road who voted Trump, sure he’s responsible for enabling this bullshit, but I’m not a monster. I’ll let the responsibility stop with those in the government voting to let this all happen
The bar for summary execution on only your judgement from afar, or mine, should be incredibly high. Much higher than before an official court and out in the open. I have exactly the same opinions about your (rather US centric) list, but I would not want to use the power to murder them on a whim. And if this is the list that you start with, where will you be after sliding into the moral quagmire of where to stop?
Wtf dude you hopped on a thread talking about the Republican party and now you’re upset that it’s US centric. Which Idk how bombing a school in Iran is US centric, but whatever.
My moral quagmire starts when the fascists are dead. Honestly I’m taking this a lot less far than many here would. I’d stop with those actually responsible. I don’t waste time hand wringing about bombing schools and empowering ICE to brutalize the country
I’m here to say it again : death note was mid
High praise for that show.
Why? It dealt with the obvious themes of post 9/11 crime and surveillance with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, the main characters were exaggerated views of what a stupid person thinks a clever person is like, and everything was contrived.
… because of those things you said. Mid being very high praise as it was clearly less than that.
Ooh fuck, they should put ointment on that burn
In its defence, it was intricate and thought out. The craftmanship of the animation was nice.
Just you know, intricate with asinine details, and thought out to arrive at the wrong conclusions.
I stuck with it to the end. I just wanted to see where it went, and was using it to practice spanish.
For me, it was simply boring to the point dropped it after about 5 episodes
I stopped at exactly the halfway point, as there’s clearly a reflection point downwards from that point on. Almost like some invisible hands at the editorial twisted the authors’ hands.
*inflection
