Liked this a lot. Despite the supernatural elements, Death Note is essentially just a detective story told from the murderer’s point of view. Seen from this lens, it’s remarkable that Ohba managed to craft something so successful — the last novelist that enjoyed such broad popularity for their murder stories was probably Agatha Christie? And yet you’re totally right about the missed opportunity for a broader, more political story. I think casual readers don’t mind the strict cat-and-mouse stuff with L because L himself is rather fun, and that arc is pretty action packed. But the second half of the manga would’ve really benefitted from the ideological expansion you mentioned. In my view it’s more about lack of ability on Ohba’s part than a message about Light’s dearth of imagination.
It’s frustrating because after the time jump you can start to see Kira’s world coming to be but it just ends up window dressing for the cat and mouse redux with Near
Exactly. You get bits and pieces (the Kira cult) but the main purpose of this new world is to put the police on the backfoot (the pressure to drop the investigation). It's never about expanding the realm of what the Death Note really means.
But you can't completely dismiss part 2 either because the ending is so memorable. Could Ohba stick the landing the way he did without more cat-and-mouse stuff? I don't know. Flawed manga for sure but there's moments of brilliance to it.
I sort of meant to write something about how it sustains itself through those moments of brilliance. The Yotsuba Group investigation arc drags a lot for me but when you finally get to the end and L hands amnesiac Light the notebook and all the memories come rushing back and he yells to himself "I'VE WON"--it's sublime
I like Jujutsu Kaisen but it's a little crazy to me how much darker it is than Yu Yu Hakusho, which I watched as a kid. Like there's the arc with the three brothers who are essentially sympathetic villains and the ending is that they all die. No conversion to friendship. Just dead!
No I actually like JJK a lot. It’s what I’m watching right now and I’ve watched like three episodes in a row the last few nights. It’s totally smooth brain entertainment for me—I do not understand the rules of domain expansion and do not care but it’s super fun.
It’s funny, I have really struggled with the characters’ names in a way I don’t generally and like, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize the guy from Gojo’s flashback arc was one of the present-day villains. And then today, enjoying day one of my little unemployment, I watched JJK 0 and so many story choices suddenly made so much more sense. Oh, I see, they barely introduce the second year students because you’re supposed to already know them
I'm under the impression that at a certain point the manga gets really bad but the anime isn't there yet. I like watching Gojo show up and destroy people. Never gets old.
I can definitely see it. The power levels are already so ludicrous it’s hard to see where it goes without getting mad stupid. Apparently a new sequel manga just launched that’s set in 2086 and is about the sorcerers fighting alien invaders lol
By the way, I don't know if it's streaming anywhere, but you should watch Giant Robo sometime (the OVA, there's a TV show with the same name but it's not the same thing). It is very good and it's sort of interesting to me in that IIRC the episodes started coming out before Evangelion but ended after, and the show is very much a meditation on fathers and sons, but goes in a totally different direction.
It's nice to learn whether these anime that were popular in my teen years were... like... actually good? "Death Note" came up recently in a discussion with friends where they were comparing it to "Psycho-Pass" (no opinion whatsoever on that, although I hear it's good), and when it was explained to me that he gets the names of criminals by watching the nightly news I was like... wait a minute, so he's just killing people the TV says is bad?? And assumed that was sort of the point. But... maybe it wasn't!
The one thing I do know about the show beyond the premise + L being a "bishie" + the memes (was expecting a reference to taking a potato chip and eating it!) is that the Death Note manga was always intended to run for exactly 108 issues, and that accordingly there's a lot of wheel-spinning between chapters 50 to 102 or so, at which point Ohba's like, ok, let's wrap this up real quick!! Which might explain the tedium of the anime adaptation?
With the caveats that I have never read a manga and have no idea how much story is in a single issue, that it ran 108 is totally crazy to me! Judging from the adaptation, Ohba just really doesn't know where to take the story. Once Light is suspect #1 he's totally trapped there, and Ohba is unable to find ways to let him wriggle out of L's supervision to revel in his role as a god of death. There's a bit of the DBZ problem where secondary characters keep getting tacked on but once they've had their one little storyline they just hang around pointlessly. This is true of Misa and even Ryuk, the shinigami who gives Light the notebook in the first place who somehow contributes so little he wasn't even worth mentioning in the article. The story is so focused on the Light and L's back-and-forth it just seals itself into that dynamic even as the viewer can see so many other possibilities.
And yeah, the ending is bizarre. There's a big time jump that doesn't actually matter and everything that happens afterward is so rushed and slapdash. It totally becomes a parody of itself by the end. Someone could probably do an amazing camp reading of the whole thing
Wait, you've never read a manga? :'O That's unbelieveable to me. I have no idea which manga are good and which are bad, but definitely I have many memories of picking up manga compilations completely at random off the shelves at the local library. The "STOP! You're reading this book the wrong way!" warning is permanently etched into my brain lol.
I remember going to Barnes and Noble with my more weeb friends and them showing me you read it backwards, but it was worse than that. Maybe it was just that manga but they were like "first you read the upper right panel, then the lower left, then lower right, then the top left" or whatever. and I was like "to me, that's preposterous."
But I was never a comics guy either! I've read Watchmen and Maus and... that's it, I think. I tried to read Ta-Nehisi Coates' Black Panther and thought it was impossibly boring. It's really only recently I've developed an appreciation for that sort of handdrawn art, which I attribute to reading picture books with the kid. I wonder if I'd do better now
Liked this a lot. Despite the supernatural elements, Death Note is essentially just a detective story told from the murderer’s point of view. Seen from this lens, it’s remarkable that Ohba managed to craft something so successful — the last novelist that enjoyed such broad popularity for their murder stories was probably Agatha Christie? And yet you’re totally right about the missed opportunity for a broader, more political story. I think casual readers don’t mind the strict cat-and-mouse stuff with L because L himself is rather fun, and that arc is pretty action packed. But the second half of the manga would’ve really benefitted from the ideological expansion you mentioned. In my view it’s more about lack of ability on Ohba’s part than a message about Light’s dearth of imagination.
It’s frustrating because after the time jump you can start to see Kira’s world coming to be but it just ends up window dressing for the cat and mouse redux with Near
Exactly. You get bits and pieces (the Kira cult) but the main purpose of this new world is to put the police on the backfoot (the pressure to drop the investigation). It's never about expanding the realm of what the Death Note really means.
But you can't completely dismiss part 2 either because the ending is so memorable. Could Ohba stick the landing the way he did without more cat-and-mouse stuff? I don't know. Flawed manga for sure but there's moments of brilliance to it.
I sort of meant to write something about how it sustains itself through those moments of brilliance. The Yotsuba Group investigation arc drags a lot for me but when you finally get to the end and L hands amnesiac Light the notebook and all the memories come rushing back and he yells to himself "I'VE WON"--it's sublime
I like Jujutsu Kaisen but it's a little crazy to me how much darker it is than Yu Yu Hakusho, which I watched as a kid. Like there's the arc with the three brothers who are essentially sympathetic villains and the ending is that they all die. No conversion to friendship. Just dead!
No I actually like JJK a lot. It’s what I’m watching right now and I’ve watched like three episodes in a row the last few nights. It’s totally smooth brain entertainment for me—I do not understand the rules of domain expansion and do not care but it’s super fun.
It’s funny, I have really struggled with the characters’ names in a way I don’t generally and like, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize the guy from Gojo’s flashback arc was one of the present-day villains. And then today, enjoying day one of my little unemployment, I watched JJK 0 and so many story choices suddenly made so much more sense. Oh, I see, they barely introduce the second year students because you’re supposed to already know them
I'm under the impression that at a certain point the manga gets really bad but the anime isn't there yet. I like watching Gojo show up and destroy people. Never gets old.
I can definitely see it. The power levels are already so ludicrous it’s hard to see where it goes without getting mad stupid. Apparently a new sequel manga just launched that’s set in 2086 and is about the sorcerers fighting alien invaders lol
By the way, I don't know if it's streaming anywhere, but you should watch Giant Robo sometime (the OVA, there's a TV show with the same name but it's not the same thing). It is very good and it's sort of interesting to me in that IIRC the episodes started coming out before Evangelion but ended after, and the show is very much a meditation on fathers and sons, but goes in a totally different direction.
Ooh I’ll try to find it!
It's nice to learn whether these anime that were popular in my teen years were... like... actually good? "Death Note" came up recently in a discussion with friends where they were comparing it to "Psycho-Pass" (no opinion whatsoever on that, although I hear it's good), and when it was explained to me that he gets the names of criminals by watching the nightly news I was like... wait a minute, so he's just killing people the TV says is bad?? And assumed that was sort of the point. But... maybe it wasn't!
The one thing I do know about the show beyond the premise + L being a "bishie" + the memes (was expecting a reference to taking a potato chip and eating it!) is that the Death Note manga was always intended to run for exactly 108 issues, and that accordingly there's a lot of wheel-spinning between chapters 50 to 102 or so, at which point Ohba's like, ok, let's wrap this up real quick!! Which might explain the tedium of the anime adaptation?
With the caveats that I have never read a manga and have no idea how much story is in a single issue, that it ran 108 is totally crazy to me! Judging from the adaptation, Ohba just really doesn't know where to take the story. Once Light is suspect #1 he's totally trapped there, and Ohba is unable to find ways to let him wriggle out of L's supervision to revel in his role as a god of death. There's a bit of the DBZ problem where secondary characters keep getting tacked on but once they've had their one little storyline they just hang around pointlessly. This is true of Misa and even Ryuk, the shinigami who gives Light the notebook in the first place who somehow contributes so little he wasn't even worth mentioning in the article. The story is so focused on the Light and L's back-and-forth it just seals itself into that dynamic even as the viewer can see so many other possibilities.
And yeah, the ending is bizarre. There's a big time jump that doesn't actually matter and everything that happens afterward is so rushed and slapdash. It totally becomes a parody of itself by the end. Someone could probably do an amazing camp reading of the whole thing
Wait, you've never read a manga? :'O That's unbelieveable to me. I have no idea which manga are good and which are bad, but definitely I have many memories of picking up manga compilations completely at random off the shelves at the local library. The "STOP! You're reading this book the wrong way!" warning is permanently etched into my brain lol.
I remember going to Barnes and Noble with my more weeb friends and them showing me you read it backwards, but it was worse than that. Maybe it was just that manga but they were like "first you read the upper right panel, then the lower left, then lower right, then the top left" or whatever. and I was like "to me, that's preposterous."
But I was never a comics guy either! I've read Watchmen and Maus and... that's it, I think. I tried to read Ta-Nehisi Coates' Black Panther and thought it was impossibly boring. It's really only recently I've developed an appreciation for that sort of handdrawn art, which I attribute to reading picture books with the kid. I wonder if I'd do better now