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.
The one thing I remember about Death Note is that dramatic narration followed by eating a potato chip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KC6T3_O2iWc
Light isn’t white he’s Japanese.
Why are we even mentioning race? Everyone’s always complaining about racism. So why don’t we just try, in general, not to apply stereotypes to any race? I dont get it.
Why are we even mentioning race?
Because 400 years of colonialism shapes people’s understanding of the modern moment.
So why don’t we just try, in general, not to apply stereotypes to any race?
You say this, but I’m still glad I put Charlie Kirk’s name in the notebook.
The hegemon of the earth is the US, which the elite of are predominantly white and many ascribe to views of white supremacy. I saw this mentioning Light as “white” just as a joke to show how similar he is to the dominant neoliberal regime of the world.
I don’t know either. People who complain a lot about racism seem to care a lot if its about one race and less if its about another.
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
the death note being on Earth was Ryuuk’s way to have fun - and he got exactly what he wanted. its purpose was to entertain a shinobi, every benefit/drawback it caused was purely accidental
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
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
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
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.
That book belongs in the hands of a thoughtful, strategic mind. Carefully select a target, watch what happens, then follow up similarly.
This is predicated on a Great Man of History understanding of the world. As much as we would like to believe Doohickeying Shinzo Abe will change the world, he is but a cog in a much larger machine as evidenced by his protege taking control of the county so quickly after his death.
You simply cannot kill your way to a better world. The Death Note is a fascist fantasy. All it can do it polarizer people against you.
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.
Spiritually Caucasian, Honorary aryan
edit; thats my guess about the mentality anyway, I’m just reposting the meme
In Japanese it’s called 名誉白人. It’s not a meme, it was literally true in Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa. It still exists as a mentality in Japan today.
Honoraryan
Dishonorayanable
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!
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
“Died of exhaustion after masturbating nonstop for three months.”
you cannot extend life
“The victim gets into the habit of the healthiest lifestyle during the three months, then gets HIV” (the victim lives in Scandinavia and gets prescription for treatment at no cost, the next day).
Hot
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.
After 39 days, you’re visited by your Shinigami, and can ask them for help workshopping how to phrase dies of some disease that can’t happen until they’re old so the auto-selected date is some point where they’re already old, but if they were already going to die before that, dying at their predestined time of an accident or disease is fine, too.
if your victim can’t die in the way you specified within 23 days then they get a heart attack. if you don’t specify a death time then 23 days after the entry that person is out of the note’s jurisdiction. you can’t just @everyone live long and be kind
unless you decide to nuke the planet and the period of “long and kind” covers only the 23 days pre nuke
That’s not supported by the disease rule. The 23 day rule would suggest you’re limited:
If you write, “die of disease” for the cause of death, but only write a specific time of death without the actual name of disease, the human will die from an adequate disease. But the Death Note can only operate within 23 days (in the human calendar). This is called the 23-day rule.
but the disease rule overrides it:
If you write, “die of disease” like before with a specific disease’s name, but without a specific time, if it takes more than 24 days for the human to die the 23-day rule will not take effect and the human will die at an adequate time depending on the disease.
The only duration limitation within the actual rules is one where instructions to opt out of it are provided.
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
After your first go, you just need to wait 39 days and your Shinigami appears, and you can ask them questions which they have to answer to the best of their ability (which isn’t guaranteed to give you the full detail, as they might not know it). That should give you a good opportunity to workshop exactly how to phrase dies of some disease that can’t happen until they’re old so the auto-selected date is some point where they’re already old, but if they were already going to die before that, dying at their predestined time of an accident or disease is fine, too and make it work.
I did see that there’s another tab to the article that phrases the 23-day rule differently, stopping you set death times further in the future than that, but then immediately explains how death times after that work for diseases, so that’s obviously self-contradictory.
There’s no disease you can only get when you’re old, people get arthritis at the age of 25. Old age just makes you more likely to get a bunch of different ailments, but they are always possible.
And there’s still the rule about not extending the lifespan, so you still wont extend your life, you’ll just die at the predestined pointPlenty of diseases have age-related in the name, and definitionally only happen to old people, with the variant affecting younger people being given a different name and often having a different trigger. If the Death Note respects human understanding of medical science, then if you specify the age-related variant of the disease, you can be confident it’ll wait. If there are any nuances, you can ask the Shinigami.
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.
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.)
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.
Why do you think that’s what you’re doing here? You’ve ignored the material conditions in order to focus on the singular aspect of power as a corrupting force, completely ignoring the context of how they gained power in the first place, a direct indicator of previous corruption. Your claims assumes the corruption happens in a vacuum once they gain power.
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.
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
believes that societies flaws are due to individual failings rather than systemic ones. Elites who commit acts of evil within the legal bounds of the system are spared.
Sounds like someone is fine with punishing individual’s failings based on their social class. Curious.
Elon Musk can stop being a rich asshole whenever he wants. Give all of his money to charity and get a normal job, like the rest of us. But he chooses not to, and that deserves to be punished, yes.
Lmao are you really trying to do the “youre bigoted against rich people”?
Billionaires that muder others by polluting nature or lobbying against their rights or otherwise make the lives of many more precarious aren’t innocent. That’s what it’s getting at. But even if this was just “anti-rich”, if you’re rich you can literally give your money away. If you’re poor unless you get extremely lucky you’re essentially screwed.
Curious.
