Comment by hibikir
10 years ago
Death Note would have been an extremely boring comic if Light had been smart or a bit ruthless. Given how easy disinformation is with a death note, it'd not be hard to hide the fact that he existed for years, and even after someone figured it out, to make it almost impossible to figure out his location. Nobody is getting bits of information about you if they don't know you exist.
So what we get in Death Note is a calamitous lead character that has to make middle schooler mistakes, that then suddenly develops some smarts: It's the only way to make the net grow close early on, but then withstand a few more books. But even with the whole second kira twist and all of that, it's very hard to make the story coherent, and kira not get caught very quickly after making the mistakes that are mandatory to make the story any fun. Ultimately, Ohba has to rely on making L also act in pretty suboptimal ways, just to make the first arc of the story last long.
Which brings us to how Death Note is a good example of why it's so hard to make realistic crime stories: It's very difficult to make a story long enough to not be trivial, and yet have the criminal get caught in the end: It's far easier to make a very good criminal or a hapless one than to make one that will move the story along at a good pace.
As @veridies says, the point of Light's actions in DN is to make the world aware of him as a God. His objective is not merely to have people die, but to let the world know that there exists an entity that is "doing good" and passing righteous judgment, living amongst them and aware of them.
If you consider that a core objective, besides just weeding out criminals, his moves weren't "middle schooler mistakes". It is explicitly addressed in both the show and the manga that he intentionally creates patterns and responds directly to provocations to make L and the detectives aware that he is amongst them and is challenging them. Whether that's a merit-worthy core objective or not is questionable, but to him the whole Death Note would have been meaningless without the ability to parade as a God, and that's what made the plot interesting.
It's possible to have a reasonable story even then, with two stipulations.
First, obviously, that L is at least as good as Light; you can't scale up one side and not the other or you don't have a story.
And second, that Light fundamentally wants to be perceived as a real force, since he's nominally trying to deter crime. Sure, if he acted slowly and randomly, he could appear nearly indistinguishable from random chance, but he wants to send a message. That stipulation is enough to force him to reveal some information, and combined with a sufficiently good L, you'd still have a story.
They actually address this in the comic / show: Light wants people to know he exists. He wants to be seen as a god with the power to smite evildoers, which requires being known to exist. Simply killing criminals covertly wouldn't accomplish his goals.
Indeed. Furthermore, he highlights the killing of Ray Penbar's wife as a "mistake". However, Ray Penbar's wife was literally about to tell L that Light can kill using methods aside from heart attacks.
The fact of the matter remained: when Light wanted to "hide" a death from the Police, he'd use a different method. (Episode 5: Kill by Traffic Accident).
The fact of the matter is, if Ray Penbar's wife actually got the information out to L, then Light would have lost right there and then. He was forced to kill her as soon as she was discovered.
If anything, his mistake was killing the FBI team through Ray Penbar in the episodes earlier. Ray Penbar wasn't suspicious of Light... but when Ray Penbar died then the entire L investigation focused on him.
> Death Note would have been an extremely boring comic if Light had been smart or a bit ruthless.
It would have been a boring manga if one made Light a bit smarter or more ruthless and tried to stick to the same plot, yes. But that just means they could have tried a different plot, and explored a different part of the world: what happens when states react to a Kira and start switching to secret rulers and figurehead leaders? The most plausible explanation for a Kira would be some exotic form of nanotech or biological warfare, so what happens when states begin crash projects into developing their own assassination tools? What happens when Light reasons that criminals are a relatively trivial cause of death and instead kills Kim Jong-il? What's the fallout of that and what risks does he have to take to fix it? Instead of a second Kira being a fan of his, perhaps it could be one with very different goals and it becomes a fairer version of the L/Light duel (you don't even have to change Light's job); and for that matter, instead of being gray and apathetic figures, what if the shinigamis were the real villains all along and Ryuk's gift to Light was a... poisoned apple, one might say?
There's plenty of stories one could tell, and I think Ohba & Obata are more than talented enough to tell those stories without requiring asspulls or idiotballs.