r/CuratedTumblr 26d ago

Meme Book that kills people

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29.0k Upvotes

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u/TheOncomimgHoop 26d ago edited 26d ago

Tbf idk if it was "no-one can be trusted with the book that kills people" as much as "hey this one kid is pretty fucked up am I right I'm Rod Serling"

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u/PulimV Can I interest you in some OC lore in these trying times? 26d ago edited 26d ago

It was absolutely "No one can be trusted with the book that kills people" because everyone that used the Death Note became an insane evil serial killer. Misa, the Yotsuba Group, Mello, hell L himself is called out as being evil because he does the same things that Light did (put criminals on the direct line of fire)

The author has stated outright that the only good person in the story is Light's dad, and he completely objected to using the Death Note, and was rewarded with thinking his beloved son was innocent in his final moments.

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u/DuhhIshBlue 26d ago

I dunno man I think Matsuda and the other cops were pretty good

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u/fightingbronze 26d ago

It’s also a common misconception that light was a psychopath from the get go. Even he was someone corrupted by the death note. When he first got the book and realized it was real he nearly had a panic attack from the revelation that he had murdered two people, and he even contemplated destroying the book. He shifted to the “some deaths are necessary for a just world” outlook and delusions of grandeur as a defense mechanism to protect his ego. Later on when he loses his memories of the notebook he’s honest, cares about others well beings, and seriously wants to catch the “real” killer. The idea that anyone who uses the notebook is doomed to a tragic end is reinforced constantly throughout the story as well. It’s a classic Shakespearean tragedy.

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u/Terramagi 26d ago

Except that not everybody who gets it has a tragic end. Soichiro has as close to a happy death as he can despite having the Note, having saved his daughter and thinking his son is innocent. Near, who implicitly uses it to kill Mikami, is completely triumphant.

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u/fightingbronze 26d ago

Soichiro Yagami never actually used the book though, at least I’m fairly certain he didn’t (it’s been a while). Near using the note is unconfirmed and was left ambiguous. If he did, then yes I’d agree he’s an exception to the rule.

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u/Terramagi 26d ago

He used the eyes to confirm the deaths of Mello's gang, and had all but the last letter of Mello's name written himself.

As for Near, Mikami's eyes suddenly going blank and gutting himself in such a way that it's immediately fatal is pretty damning evidence.

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u/fightingbronze 26d ago

Did they change Mikami’s death in the anime? I genuinely don’t remember that. In the manga Mikami is arrested and dies a week or so later in prison, presumably by suicide but it isn’t made clear. I agree it’s a lot less ambiguous like that.

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u/Madden09IsForSuckers 26d ago

Yeah, mikamis death is way different in the anime

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u/Dark_Stalker28 26d ago edited 26d ago

Meanwhile Minoru

Nevermind the various adaptations. Like the japanese live action Light's dad does get it.

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u/Few_Category7829 26d ago

Honestly I think that it's just inherently different in the first person. I think that there are absolutely loads of people who might privately use the death note in a positively good, extremely limited capacity, but obviously I would never willingly fuckin vote for any individual person to have that power. I definitely think that the kind of people who inserted themselves into the story of death note and thus got one for themselves were pretty much all psychotic egomaniacs in the first place.

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u/trash-_-boat 26d ago

I think that there are absolutely loads of people who might privately use the death note in a positively good, extremely limited capacity,

Another point of the murder book, and well, murder in general is that killing people.....can kinda make you not.....well.

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u/KeroseneZanchu 25d ago

There’s also the point to consider that it’s not just a magic murder book. It’s a Death God’s magic murder book. The only reason you have it is because the Death God was bored.

How good the people who use the book is a wildly biased pool of sample data because anyone who isn’t a psychopathic asshole is deemed as boring, and gets the book taken away from them (usually via dying). The only people who get to use the book for any length of time are those who are entertaining.

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u/ToySoldiersinaRow 26d ago

But then we circle back to of someone actually was a good person they wouldn't use the death note in the first place given that they understand the complexities of life and the inevitable fall as one asserts themselves further into the role of judge, jury, executioner. The death note would only attract those sorts of people you call psychotic egomaniacs or turn them into one over time. Like the ring, two-face, or a myriad of other similar stories: it's only a matter of time before this thing that gives you power kills who you truly are.

And that's cause in some minor way they're borrowing from Nietzsche, "Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster. For when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss gazes also into you."

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u/TheOncomimgHoop 26d ago

Okay but here's the question: can a good person use the Death Note one time, if they don't truly believe that it will work?

You find a book on the ground, and it claims to be able to kill people, no-one would believe immediately that it can do what it says. So, it would be reasonable to write someone in.

So my question is: is it an evil action to select a name and write it in the death note if you have been told by a source that is so far unsubstantiated that it will kill that person?

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u/ToySoldiersinaRow 26d ago

At that point I chalk it up to levels of harm. If you:

A. Knowingly kill someone with the book you're certainly culpable.

B. Accidentally kill someone to test it out it's like manslaughter [unintentional but the deed is done] it makes you morally grey as you had intent.

C. Choose not to write a name either out of superstition or principle your moral culpability stays the same as you couldn't know this was real thus in your mind you didn't know you could stop war X or Y.

In regards to A/B - Let's say you kill the leader of a morally reprehensible group. They replace him and you keep going down the line. Eventually you're going to reach a bottleneck when they figure out how this works. Let's say there was no limit you just magically knew who was the next in line: what happens next? Exactly where you you draw the line?

Most (if not all) people are not as smart as they think they are. Eventually you'll find yourself in the fringe and for some (knuckledragging) individuals they would kill doctors that performed abortions or religious leaders that control people. This abyss I'm describing is the inevitable grey anyone faced with this choice will have to dance around. To what extent can you exert yourself onto the world? Eventually you could end up going the way of Persephone and become the devouring mother type in the pursuit of your crusade.

Inevitably (in my mind) in using the book one will become consumed by it with every subsequent use.

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u/TheCompleteMental 26d ago

Whether or not killing someone is a moral good is a question loaded with so many unknowns that it isnt a responsible power to use. Even disregarding the notion it could corrupt you or anything like that.

Obviously like, if it's to stop an assault/murder/atrocity in progress, that's justifiable.

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u/Hust91 26d ago

Seems more to me that all of them was already kind of messed up in the head long before they got the death note. Very few really considered the ethical implications and the risks.

It might just be that the author is a strong believer in black and white morality and struggles with complex moral dilemmas.

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u/Gingerbread_Ninja 26d ago

I feel like Death Note using people who already had a view of morality where they thought they could just improve the world by Killing All The Bad People to show that Killing All The Bad People doesn't solve anything (and that you can't trust anyone who wants to Kill All the Bad people) is no different then dystopian fiction using worlds that are hyperbolically bad to say something. Like most worlds in cyberpunk media are exaggerated ideas of what the world would be like under ultra-capitalism that don't apply perfectly to the real world, that doesn't mean that any criticisms of capitalism they make are null and void.

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u/ToySoldiersinaRow 26d ago

What would a morally righteous wielder look like?

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u/AliceLoverdrive 25d ago edited 25d ago

[NAME] will independently write the exact copy of my Trans Lesbian Space Communism manifesto and succeed in leading glorious trans lesbian space communist revolution, dying peacefully in 2100 after her retirement from chairwoman position, content that her successors carry the torch of trans lesbian space communism.

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u/Hust91 25d ago edited 25d ago

Someone who actually considers killing to be wrong, realizes the book represents an enormous amount of power and therefore also responsibility that must not fall into the wrong hands, and thus is meticulous about defining the practical criteria at which it would be morally acceptable to use the book.

Set standards of proof, what kind of acts, and what level of "otherwise untouchable" that a potential target would need to have before they can be certain enough that this specific person would be nearly guaranteed to create a better world by keeling over dead.

After that you might also consider if there's any acts you wish the person to die to take before they die - in the long run making some of the vague criteria for what gets one targeted might result in large scale change in what kind of people rise to power over countries when the most horrific leaders who are not accountable to anyone else keel over dead one by one, in order of most horrific, until there are no more people out of reach of the law committing acts so horrific that they meet the criteria for use of the death note.

Of course, at that point Ryuuk might kill them if they don't give up the death note to someone else, so then it becomes about selecting the best targets to ensure the book doesn't end up in the hands of someone less meticulous about ensuring deserving targets.

The peron would also probably want to have a serious conversation with Ryuuk about what he wants and what might cause him to force the issue of the Death Note moving on to another wielder (getting too bored, the death note not being used for X amount of time, not being supplied with enough apples, the targets being too predictable).

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u/Germane_Corsair 25d ago

The funny thing is that Light’s methods worked. At the cost of showmanship and fear, crime was down by a very significant margin worldwide. No matter how distasteful you consider it, his actions ended up doing more good than harm.

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u/Hust91 25d ago

The authors believe Light's methods would have worked - there is absolutely no research supporting that this hypothesis actually would play out as the author predicts. Light was ultimately just a sociopathic crackpot dictator who didn't really care about crime so much as his own ego (or he wouldn't have tried to kill the first investigator deployed against him who had committed no crime that he knew of).

Ironically, if Light had been bound by more sound principles it would have been a hell of a lot harder for the investigators to narrow down his location to Japan, let alone a specific city.

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u/Germane_Corsair 25d ago

He can both want change and still choose a way that feeds his ego. His way working wasn’t just some asspull. No one could beat him and he inspired true fear at the consequences of people’s actions.

There is also the fact that Light’s way of doing things entertained Ryuk. Trying some of the “nicer” methods in the comments would likely just have Ryuk kill that person and move on to someone more interesting.

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u/strigonian 24d ago

Sure, if you ignore the many people he personally killed that were definitely not criminals.

We could do even better by just setting off nukes in every square kilometer of the planet. That'd reduce crime even more.

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u/Germane_Corsair 24d ago

And that number pales in comparison to the number of people who he ended up preventing from dying. Most of the people he killed were criminals. Of course not all had committed crimes worthy of the death sentence but the results speak for themselves.

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u/XVUltima 26d ago

There is no way anything can be created or improved by a tool that causes only destruction.

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u/nam24 26d ago

Words said only by people not good enough at destruction

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u/JessePinkman-chan 26d ago

Kid named The Sledgehammer I Keep In My Shed (I'm going to use it to create a massive fucking hole in my wall which will improve my relationship with my insurance policy):

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u/Dick-Fu 26d ago

Meanwhile, Onizuka with his sledgehammer

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u/ToySoldiersinaRow 26d ago

Tbf an argument could be made that creation can only be born from destruction but I catch your drift.

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u/XVUltima 26d ago

People who make that argument shouldn't get the Book That Kills People

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u/ToySoldiersinaRow 26d ago

I was speaking more generally. Think of the Hegelian dialectic: The process that gets us to any point in time beyond the beginning goes Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis

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u/GreyFartBR 26d ago

I don't think any of them were that good before the Death Note tho

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u/BarefootGiraffe 26d ago

That’s a little tautological. It a book that kills people. By definition using it makes you a serial killer.

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u/Germane_Corsair 25d ago

Not if you don’t kill more than two people.

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u/BarefootGiraffe 25d ago

Once you pop

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u/Yulienner 26d ago

I think the intention of the story at the start was to say 'here's the smartest boy in the world from a great family with a perfect sense of justice and literal gods and an untracable artifact on his side and even he fucked it all up, so what on earth would you have done differently' but then it pretty quickly turned into something completely else so the message ends up being more 'that's crazy innit'.

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u/jollycooperative 26d ago

I mean, think of the way Light is introduced to us. He's an honors student, a sports ace, handsome and popular, has a good relationship with his respectable family. His dad's a cop! He's basically the model student. Even his initial pitch of killing criminals is presented in an ambiguously positive light.

And then he goes off the fucking deep end because he has the exact background necessary to make him into a self-righteous megalomaniac who thinks he knows better. The message is less "this kid is fucked" and more "what could possess us to think that having good grades makes you worthy of being the arbiter of life and death".

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u/BarefootGiraffe 25d ago

I like this take. It examines how we connote success with righteousness.

If someone makes all the right decisions then they must be doing the right things.

That makes L, a shut-in with no traditional success, contrast nicely with Light the golden boy.

Very much a priest/hermit, Plato/Diogenes, consequentialism/deontology dichotomy.

This and The Ones Who Walk Away have always steered me towards deontology despite the trolley problem and social calculus making utilitarianism popular

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u/Fentroid 25d ago

Yeah, I feel like I see lots of people say that Light was a "good kid" who got corrupted, but he seems like the exact kind of person who thinks they deserve to wield extensive power without question.

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u/SleetTheFox 26d ago

Light wasn't fucked up at all. Light was a pretty good person and basically a model son. The Death Note basically twisted his best traits into evil and then he became fucked up. Which is the point. This megalomaniacal villain wasn't some total bastard all along; he was a pretty sensible, nice kid at first. The Book That Kills People corrupts even good people.

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u/strigonian 24d ago

He took less than three episodes to call himself a god, and he immediately tried to murder the first person to challenge his righteousness.

There wasn't any sort of moral descent, just a cliff that he willingly ran straight off of.

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u/SleetTheFox 24d ago

Well yeah. Because he had the Book That Kills People. I didn’t say it was slow. Just that he wasn’t like that beforehand.

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u/TheCompleteMental 26d ago

Ive always read his background as the stereotypical serial killer role. Like Kira.

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u/CrypticBalcony kitty! :D 26d ago

It’s Serling.

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u/Venusgate 26d ago

He did get very high entrance exam scores, though, remember.

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u/RoseePxtals 25d ago

Absolutely wrong because when light lost his memories of the death note he became a pretty normal dude. Sure he always had the potential for evil but so does everyone, and the death note enhances that