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 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
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
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
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 point