Give me the Death Note, I can be trusted to act rationally. The only “undeserving” to end up on it would be people who step through Metro doors and immediately stop, even though there’s people behind them.
More seriously I know the author has said it’s about power corrupting, but if that’s the story he wanted to tell then he should’ve chosen a different protagonist. Its also a silly mantra, we do not live in a Tolkien novel, power isn’t some supernatural force.
Light is a dumb teenager with a 4chan edgelord worldview who killed a bunch of people in the edgiest way possible. The Death Note was truly wasted on him
If he wanted it to be about how power corrupts, Light wouldn’t have been so damn enthusiastic about using it right from the get go.
Also the fear of the deathnote would be a more powerful tool than just killing every criminal.
For example: once a month, target the richest person on the Forbes list. Eventually they’d be scrambling to fall off that list
not even, deathnote can control what a person does before their death. Make them give away all their assets before dying just like light made criminals give out all the information about their buddies to the police.
I really want a communist version of the Death Note about some Left-Com or a trot or a reddit “anarchist” getting the book or something like that. Seeing them slowly understand what “authority” is could be cool
More seriously I know the author has said it’s about power corrupting, but if that’s the story he wanted to tell then he should’ve chosen a different protagonist. Its also a silly mantra, we do not live in a Tolkien novel, power isn’t some supernatural force.
If you take the position that “power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals”, then it fits perfectly into Death Note’s story. Light is monologuing about how much he hates the world from minute one of the anime IIRC, the Death Note lets him carry out his darkest fantasies, and the justifications he dreams up for his actions always sound hollow.
Yeah the literal first thing light says in the manga (internal monologue) is some trash about how the world is a rotten mess. Sure, a central theme of the story is kindof literally that power is a supernatural force deified thru the notebook (or the shinigami I guess) but there’s many different layers to me.
Light has that dog in him, that’s part of why the story is so interesting. It’s implied (I think outright stated) that other humans have had death notes and even been “corrupted by thier power” but nobody even scratched the surface of what Light did with it. He became the world’s biggest genocide-r trying to make himself a god of justice because his sense of justice was already perverted, if that makes sense. Meme ain’t too far off tbh, I always saw light as a straight up fascist lol.
It’s been years since I read the manga or watched the anime, but IIRC you’re right, and Ryuk tells Light early on that most people who’d get the death note would immediately want nothing to do with it after realizing it’s real, rather than a prank.
I guess, but then that kind of still doesn’t work for the story, because what does power reveal about L or his replacement? That they’re very clever boys?
Mello is my favorite clever boy
Peace be with you
Light was a really, really bad example for that. He was arrogant and contemptuous even before the Death Note. All the Death Note did was remove his inhibitions. In my opinion, people without a conscience are way more easily corrupted by power. That’s why my favorite killer is still Dexter Morgan😄. At least he has a code and knows damn well that he’s an asshole.
white
He’s Japanese though?
Everything else is accurate though. Picking a uniquely unfit person to give power to isn’t a story about power corrupting.
lotta white people interpret japanese characters as white in anime and manga for mostly obvious reasons. when i was a kid and watched pokemon i was never made to think ash wasn’t white
jelly filled donuts!
Spiritually Caucasian, Honorary aryan
edit; thats my guess about the mentality anyway, I’m just reposting the meme
Honoraryan
Dishonorayanable
But all of those people were convicted by the Japanese legal system, which famously never falsely convicts anyone…
Look, power corrupts, except when you give some designated prodigy richkid supreme authority over Interpol and Japanese police
Watching this as a teenager, I pretty much immediately realised that there was nothing in the mechanics of the Death Note stopping you from saying people died of old age having lived an ethical and fulfilling life free from crime after <the date the entry was written>. The real power of the Death Note was in the apparently unlimited ability to set the conditions of death, and it was barely used.
There is,
- you can only control the victim’s actions for like 3 months
- you cannot extend life
I just looked it up on the wiki, and the closest thing I can find is the 23-day rule, which isn’t mentioned in the anime, and only adds the condition that if you specify a specific time within 23 days and specific disease that wouldn’t be fatal in the timeframe you specified, it defaults to a heart attack. If you specify a disease that takes over 23 days to develop and no specific time, then the disease will progress starting when you write at its natural speed. Old age as a cause with no date seems to fit the latter category.
i wouldn’t say that “old age” is a disease. it’s a state where actual diseases can kill you way easier, their incubation time would probably be lower than normal in that case.
but you could probably go for something like HIV which takes 1-10 years and might be fatal, especially if untreated.
The conditions weren’t unlimited and you could not exceed 30 days from when you wrote the name, if you did they’d just die of a heart attack.
You could not make the person do something that was far outside their character (like make Bezos give up all his money). But then again that seemed to get dropped since he made the FBI lady go straight home and off herself. Then again that rule was just what Light believed it to be, so the author has some cover there.https://deathnote.fandom.com/wiki/Rules_of_the_Death_Note/Manga_Chapter_Rules doesn’t mention anything about a 30 day limit, and does say that any human is considered capable of suicide. I watched it closer to my birth than to now, so I’m just going off vague memories of what I thought when I watched it and the wiki, which might not be perfect.
Its not the suicide that’s the bit, its the “getting told who Kira is and doing nothing about it” thats the un characteristic bit.
There’s also this
Neither suicide nor accidental death can cause a death that directly results in the death of anyone other than the person whose name is written. If it would cause the death of another human being, it would be a heart attack under circumstances where the person named would not cause the death of a third party."
So thats another limit i suppose.
It also says a human can’t use the Death Note to extend their lifespan, but then again it also states that
The use of the Death Note in the human world sometimes affects other humans’ lives or shortens their original life span, even though their names are not actually written in the Death Note itself.
So it kind of seems like the author is making it up as they go along. Its been a while since I read it as well and I remember something about a time limit, but now its not there, so I guess thats just Nelsom Mandela hitting me with those dimensional rays
edit: found this for you
You cannot set a death date longer than the victim’s original lifespan. Even if the victim’s death is entered in the Death Note, if it is beyond his or her original lifespan, the victim will die before the set time.
And then theres also the thing about “old age” not being a cause of death
Its also a silly mantra, we do not live in a Tolkien novel, power isn’t some supernatural force.
We’ve been asking this question for thousands of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Gyges
Yes, power corrupts — in a measurable way that resembles brain damage. https://www.sciencefocus.com/wellbeing/powerful-mindset-psychology-2
Power is a social relationship. We are, more than anything, social animals. Social relationships are probably the most impactful driver of our behavior.
Those studies really put the cart before the horse.
People don’t lie and steal because they became powerful, they became powerful because they’re really good at lying and stealing.
Sorry I referenced a widely known piece of fiction instead of the epic of Gilgamesh or something.
Secondly: Your pop-science article does not seem to show that the abstract notion of power is some magical all-encompassing force, rather it makes vague gestures towards how current hierarchical structures in capitalist society either appeal to “bad people” or rewards the behavior of “the worst people”.
There’s no causal link between the concept of power and people “becoming worse”, because of course there wouldnt be. A kindergarten teacher has immense power over her students, am I to believe due to some magical particle she becomes “evil” some day? No.That’s a rather flawed conclusion to draw from the evidence - nothing in it excludes power being gained through preexisting corruption, and considering the context of the dominant economic system actively rewarding the exploitation of others it seems incredibly naive to think power inherently corrupts. Do you really think Musk, Trump, or Zuckerberg used to be fundamentally decent people and only went off the rails once they gained power?
I don’t think anyone is 100% good or 100% bad, or that a single factor in isolation reliably flips them from 100% good to 100% evil, no.
I just think outcomes are more sufficiently explained by looking at material conditions and systems larger than one individual’s actions or immutable characteristics determined at birth.
(In fact, I kinda thought the whole “systems and material conditions vs. individuals and immutable traits” thing was basically the philosophical origins of communism vs. fascism in a nutshell.)
The problem with the conclusion that “power corrupts” is that it’s next to impossible to tease out a casual relationship. Yes, we can see that power and lack of empathy are correlated, but none of the experiments noted in the article you posted can definitively say whether that’s because 1) power makes people lose empathy or 2) unempathetic people are more likely to accrue power.
There’s also a contextual factor to consider. Many socialists have argued that capitalism incentivizes unempathetic behavior, and that it is possible to build a system where empathy is selected for rather than selected against. This is also impossible to prove definitively, but if true then it would be the case that the particular lack of empathy we see in many powerful people is specific to our own society, and not to humanity in general.
If you storm into the elevator before anybody has the chance to get off, crowding it even worse, oh you better believe I’m writing your name.
Get this person power over death immediately
