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.
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