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NEWS: Salon Magazine Looks at Death Note

Ryuk's notebook is found by Light Yagami, a brilliant, aimless college-bound son of a cop, who decides he's going to use the power of life and death to make a better world. Wackiness ensues.

Near the end

there's a series of exceptionally creepy scenes in which one character is seen playing with little wooden toys that represent the rest of the cast -- and then wearing a cardboard mask of another character's face.

Bout darn time that the Death Note manga is receiving main stream exposure which it rightfully deserves.

There's an awful lot of "if he knows that I know that he knows that I know, then that's exactly what he's expecting me to do" stuff.

cheerfully convoluted thriller about a psychotic, nearly omnipotent teenage serial killer -- who's the good guy, more or less

Even the fatal notebook itself is regulated by a series of arcane mystical laws: the precise amounts of time its death sentences can take, the consequences of giving up possession of it, its relationship to the Shinigami. At worst, an American version of Kira, whacking the bad guys left and right without blinking, would just be John Rambo. Ohba and Obata's story is just the opposite: It's built around the ever-tightening knots of moral ambiguity that come with the power of judgment, and the creeping fear that free will may actually mean nothing and personal identity may be no more than a hollow mask.

Quote:

cheerfully convoluted thriller about a psychotic, nearly omnipotent teenage serial killer -- who's the good guy, more or less

I am getting pretty sick of people calling Light the good guy. The main character, yes. The lead protagonist, sure. Good guy, no! He is a mass murderer, and don't tell me he just kills criminals either, or that all of the criminals he did kill deserved the death penalty

In other words Americans are to stupid to understand arcane details, and execute them with precision. Anyway to take a shot and bash your own country buddy.

For one thing, the peculiar logic of "Death Note" depends on unbreakable social rules that aren't nearly as stringent in the United States. Ohba's characters -- including the ones who are happy to murder with a stroke of a pen -- repeatedly refuse to take obvious courses of action that would violate their socialization and moral codes.

Quote:

For one thing, the peculiar logic of "Death Note" depends on unbreakable social rules that aren't nearly as stringent in the United States. Ohba's characters -- including the ones who are happy to murder with a stroke of a pen -- repeatedly refuse to take obvious courses of action that would violate their socialization and moral codes.

Nothing there about stupidity, just supporting the point that the whole series is based around rigid social rules that the US doesn't have, and the notebook's operation is representative part of that. Though I suppose that the context of a quote is another one of those "arcane details."